LIBRARY 

University   of   California^ 

IRVINE 


"<- 

SV 


SUN  HUNTING 


President  Harding,  an  occasional  sun-hunter,  slices  one  into  the  palmettos 
on  one  of  Miami  Beach's  three  links. 


SUN  HUNTING 

Adventures   and   Observations   among  the   Native 

and  Migratory  Tribes  of  Florida,  including  the 

Stoical  Time-Killers  of  Palm  Beach,  the 

Gentle   and   Gregarious   Tm-Canners 

of  the  Remote  Interior,  and  the 

Vivacious  and   Semi- Violent 

Peoples   of   Miami   and 

Its  Purlieus 


By  .,& 

Qp 

Kenneth  L.  Roberts^ 

Author  of  Why  Europe  Leaves  Home 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


COPYRIGHT,  1922 
BY  THE  CURTIS  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT,  1922 
BY  THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 


f 


Printed  in  the  United  States  o/  America. 


PRESS  OF 

BRAUNWORTH   A   CO. 

BOOK    MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN,    N.    Y. 


To 
JUAN  PONCE  DE  LEON 

WHO  FOUND  IN  1513 
THAT  FLORIDA  WASN'T  ALL  IT  WAS 

CRACKED  UP  TO  BE 
BUT  WHO  LIKED  IT  WELL  ENOUGH 

TO  Go  BACK 

THIS  BOOK  is  APPRECIATIVELY 
DEDICATED 


CONTENTS 

BOOK    ONE 

THE  TIME-KILLERS 


Chapter  Page 

I  Of  time-killing  in  the  French  and  English 
manner — and  of  ancient  and  modern  Ameri- 
can time-slaughterers 3 

II  Of  the  passage  from  winter  to  summer  in  one 
day's  time — and  of  the  habitat  of  some  rare 
specimens 8 

III  Of  the  peculiar  differences  between  two  sides 

of    a    lake — of    money    odors — and    of    the 
questers  after   Charley   Schwab     ....     13 

IV  Of  the  apotheosis  of  the  bicycle — of  the  uses  of 

wheel-chairs — and    of    the   mental    activities 
of  chair-chauffeurs 18 

V    Of  the  telegram-expecters — of  the  date-guessers 

— and  of  the  statistic  weevils 22 

VI  Of  the  changing  of  clothes — of  the  way  they 
wear  'em — and  of  the  females  of  the  dress- 
ferret  species 26 

VII  Of  the  fascinations  of  the  beach — of  the  sand- 
hounds  from  Odessa  and  elsewhere — and  of 
prudes  and  stylish  stouts 30 

VIII    Of  the  Three  Day  Suckers — of  true  smartness 

— and  of  the  Buckwheats  and  the  dead  line    36 

IX    Of  the  smartest  thing  in  Palm  Beach — of  large 

amounts  of  money — and  of  the  Old  Guard    41 

X  Of  those  who  wish  to  crash  into  society — and  of 
those  who  furnish  the  palpitating  society 
items  47 


CONTENTS— Continued 

Chapter                                                               Page 
XI    Of  the  Alibi  Window— of  the  trick  flasks  and 
canes — of  drinkers  frail  and  fat — and  of  one 
conception   of   simplicity 50 

XII  Of  nuts  in  the  Coconut  Grove— of  Bradley's 
— of  the  relaxation  and  amusement  of  the 
Beach  Club-fellows — and  of  gambling  in 
general 55 

XIII  Of  the  divergences  between  Bradley's  and 
Monte  Carlo — of  the  idiosyncrasies  of  the 
little  white  pill — of  the  oddities  of  fat  play- 
ers— of  time-killing  pastimes — and  of  the  wis- 
dom of  Dionysius  the  Elder 62 


BOOK   TWO 

THE  TIN-CANNERS 

I  Of  January  in  the  North — of  the  winter  pas- 
times of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Charles  Walnut — 
and  of  a  penetrating  chill 71 

II  Of  a  pronounced  change  of  scene — of  a  daring 
game  of  chance  amid  tropical  scents — and 
of  the  gloating  of  Charles  Walnut  and  Her- 
man Blister «.  .  75 

III  Of  migrants  and  migrations — of  the  true  sun- 

hunter  and  his  desires — and  of  his  uniform, 
and  his  fluent  assortment  of  equipment  .  .  79 

IV  Of  the  Tin-Can  Tourists  of  the  World— of  im- 

migrants and  other  unsupervised  and  unso- 
licited visitors,  national  and  local — of  cheap 
skates — and  of  the  reason  why  tin-canners  do 
not  abound  in  Palm  Beach 87 

V  Of  portable  bungalows — of  the  rheumatic  dairy- 
man— of  the  little  ole  truck — of  simple 
pleasures  and  low  expenditures  ....  96 

VI  Of  Mrs.  Jarley,  the  original  tin-canner — of  the 
two  schools  of  tin-can  thought — of  the  hard- 
boiled  bachelor  with  the  condensed  outfit 
— and  of  folk  who  ride  on  the  backs  of  their 
necks  103 


CONTENTS— Continued 

Chapter  Page 

VII  Of  the  migrant  from  Marion — of  his  fears — of 
land  at  a  nickel  an  acre — of  sand  fleas  and 
sand  spurs — of  loneliness  and  honeymooners 
— and  of  the  doctor  who  was  run  to  death  no 

VIII  Of  the  marvelous  sitting  ability  of  the  tin- 
canners — of  the  parks  in  which  they  sit — of 
the  horseshoe  bugs  and  the  checker  and 
domino  beetles — of  the  delicate  movements 
of  a  celebrated  horseshoe  tosser — and  of  the 
International  Horseshoe  Club  ....  I  IS 


I  Of  the  enthusiasm  of  all  growing  things  in 
Florida — of  paw-paws  and  prospectuses  and 
perfect  thirty-fours — of  fiends  in  human 
shape — and  of  the  watchfulness  of  the  na- 
tives for  insults 125 

II  Of  hotel  rates — of  mosquitoes — and  of  the 
outcry  against  the  Shipping  Board  for  daring 
to  mention  Europe 130 

III  Of  palm  trees — of  varieties  of  fish — and  of  fruit 

and  liars  and  Baron  Munchausen       .     .     .  134 

IV  Of  Miami  and  of  tropical  growth — of  the  grow- 

ing of  a  shingle  into  a  bungalow — of  the 
population  of  Miami  in  1980 — and  of  the 
pronunciation  of  Miami 137 

V  Of  real-estate  dealers — of  the  large  handsome 
salesmen — of  noisy  auctions — of  absolute 
and  unabsolute  auctions — and  of  prices  for 
every  pocketbook 143 

VI  Of  subdivisions,  wise  and  otherwise — of  land- 
scape atrocities — of  small  farms  and  farmers 
— and  of  fascinating  strawberry  and  tomato 
statistics  150 

VII  Of  the  suspicious  stories  concerning  the  mango 
— of  the  pet  mango  of  the  Miamians — and 
of  its  superiority  to  other  things  ....  156 


CONTENTS— Concluded 

Chapter  Page 

VIII  Of  the  Everglades  and  of  the  two  seasons  ob- 
taining in  that  damp  locality — and  of  grass, 
fancy  and  otherwise 161 

IX  Of  the  old  Miami  and  the  new  Miami — of  dif- 
ferences between  Miami  Beach  and  Palm 
Beach — of  the  scenic  possibilities  in  floating 
coconuts  and  the  activities  of  John  S. 
Collins 165 

X  Of  the  arrival  of  Carl  Fisher  in  Miami — of 
Fisher's  feverish  imagination  and  violent 
dreams — of  the  despair  of  Fisher's  friends 
— and  of  the  evolution  of  a  jungle  .  .  .  172 

XI  Of  expensive  expenses  and  heated  ice-rinks — 
of  lily  on  lily  that  o'erlace  the  sea — and  of 
the  boneheadedness  of  most  of  the  human 
race 178 

XII  Of  one-piece  and  two-fifths-piece  bathing  suits — 
of  the  Honorable  William  Jennings  Bryan 
and  his  activities — of  bootleggers — of  the 
sanctimonious  Haig  and  Haig  boys — and  of 
rum  in  general 183 

XIII  Of  Florida  fishing — of  the  tigerish  barracuda 
and  the  surprised-looking  dolphin — of  the 
unconventional  habits  of  the  whip-ray  and 
the  varying  estimates  of  Cap'n  Charley 
Thompson — and  of  the  conservative  raving 
of  the  Miami  prospectuses 191 


BOOK    ONE 

THE   TIME-KILLERS 


SUN  HUNTING 

CHAPTER  I 

OF    TIME-KILLING    IN    THE    FRENCH    AND    ENGLISH 

MANNER — AND    OF    ANCIENT   AND    MODERN 

AMERICAN   TIME-SLAUGHTERERS 

PEOPLE  who  have  any  time  to  kill  are 
usually  filled  with  a  deep  and  intense  desire 
to  kill  it  in  some  spot  far  removed  from  their 
usual  haunts. 

This  desire  is  not  so  much  due  to  their 
wish  to  avoid  making  a  mess  around  the 
house  as  it  is  to  the  peculiar  mental  obses- 
sion known  to  the  French  as  "homesickness 
^or  elsewhere."  French  society  has  been 
afflicted  for  years  with  a  passionate  desire 
to  be  somewhere  that  it  isn't.  A  Parisian 
with  time  to  kill  aims  to  move  up  to  the  clear 
cold  air  of  the  mountains  where  he  can  kill 

3 


4  SUN  HUNTING 

lots  of  it.  When  he  gets  to  the  mountains, 
it  suddenly  occurs  to  him  that  possibly  he 
might  find  a  little  more  time  to  kill  at  the 
seashore,  where  the  eye  may  roam  at  will 
across  the  boundless  and  unobstructed 
waves.  So  he  moves  to  the  seashore  and  at 
once  begins  to  suspect  that  in  Paris  one  can 
find  more  weapons  with  which  to  cause 
time  to  die  a  lingering  and  horrible  death. 
So  he  moves  back  to  Paris,  where  he  once 
more  hunts  restlessly  for  other  means  to  kill 
time.  He  has  the  homesickness  for  else- 
where. 

The  English,  too,  have  it  to  a  marked 
degree.  All  Englishmen  who  have  incomes 
larger  than  two  hundred  guineas  a  year  own 
tea  baskets  with  which  they  go  off  to  dis- 
tant heaths  or  popular  woods  on  bank  holi- 
days and  week-ends  for  the  purpose  of 
killing  time  and  burying  it  with  the  appro- 
priate funeral  exercises.  They  are  all  the 
time  running  up  to  the  moors  for  a  bit  of 
rough  shooting,  or  over  to  Switzerland  for 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  5 

a  bit  of  sheeing,  or  off  to  a  country-house 
for  a  bit  of  punting  or  Scotch-drinking,  or 
down  to  Brighton  for  a  week-end.  An  Eng- 
lish week-end  is  sadly  misnamed,  inasmuch 
as  it  usually  consists  of  Friday,  Saturday, 
Sunday  and  Monday,  with  a  bit  of  Thurs- 
day and  Tuesday  thrown  in  for  good 
measure. 

Of  late  years,  the  American  people  have 
been  growing  increasingly  proficient  at  time- 
killing.  Forty  years  ago,  the  average 
American,  confronted  with  a  little  extra 
time,  didn't  know  what  to  do  with  it.  Us- 
ually he  took  it  into  the  front  parlor  and  sat 
around  on  haircloth  furniture  with  it,  and 
became  so  sick  of  it  that  he  never  wanted  to 
see  its  face  again.  If  he  felt  within  him 
the  primitive  urge  to  take  it  somewhere  and 
kill  it,  he  hesitated  to  do  so  because  the 
roads  were  bad,  automobiles  hadn't  been 
invented,  and  the  South  was  only  regarded 
as  the  place  where  the  Civil  War  started. 
Distances  were  great.  Few  people  cared  to 


6  SUN  HUNTING 

travel,  because  it  was  generally  believed  that 
a  person  who  absented  himself  from  busi- 
ness more  than  one  working  day  out  of 
every  five  years  was  a  loose,  dangerous  and 
depraved  character.  One  of  the  most  excit- 
ing things  to  do  forty  years  ago  was  to  put 
on  a  striped  flannel  coat  and  play  croquet 
on  the  front  lawn. 

To-day,  however,  America  has  caught  the 
germs  of  "homesickness  for  elsewhere" 
from  the  French  and  English.  Florida  has 
been  reclaimed  from  the  swamps  and  the 
Indians,  the  small  automobile  has  been  put 
within  the  means  of  stevedores,  cooks, 
second-story  workers  and  moderately  suc- 
cessful story-writers,  and  golf  trousers  may 
be  worn  in  western  towns  without  causing 
the  wearer  to  be  shot.  A  road  is  cursed 
fluently  by  an  automobilist  if  it  is  bad 
enough  to  get  his  wheel-spokes  muddy.  The 
business  man  who  can't  knock  off  work  for 
two  or  three  months  a  year  is  regarded 
pityingly  as  being  either  a  back  number, 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  7 

feeble-minded,  or  a  poor  man.  All  of  these 
things  being  so,  Americans  with  time  to  kill 
can  take  it  farther  from  home  and  kill  it  with 
more  thoroughness  than  any  other  people  on 
earth.  They  go  into  their  time-killing  with 
more  energy  than  do  Europeans.  The 
European  is  usually  content  to  do  his  time- 
killing  within  three  hundred  miles  of  home. 
The  American  is  never  content  unless  he  can 
travel  from  fifteen  hundred  to  three  thou- 
sand miles,  and  wind  up  with  an  orgy  of 
time-killing  that  would  make  a  professional 
executioner  look  by  comparison  like  the 
president  of  a  Dorcas  society. 


CHAPTER  II 

OF  THE  PASSAGE  FROM   WINTER  TO  SUMMER  IN  ONE 

DAY'S  TIME — AND  OF  THE  HABITAT  OF  SOME 

RARE    SPECIMENS 

IT  is  in  Florida  that  the  American  time- 
killer  may  be  found  in  all  his  glory ;  and  the 
largest,  most  perfect  and  most  brilliantly 
colored  specimens  are  to  be  found  at  Palm 
Beach.  It  is  at  Palm  Beach  that  one  finds 
the  very  rare  variety  measuring  twenty 
minutes  from  tip  to  tip. 

One  can  best  understand  why  it  is  that 
winter-bound  northerners  select  Florida  as 
the  scene  of  their  time-killing  by  following 
in  their  footsteps  and  boarding  a  Florida- 
bound  night  train  in  a  northern  city  during 
a  heavy  blizzard. 

Early  the  next  morning,  when  one  disen- 
tangles the  bedclothes  from  his  neck  and 
elevates  the  trick  shade  of  the  sleeping-car 
window  after  the  usual  severe  struggle,  one 
finds  that  the  snow  has  nearly  disappeared. 
8 


JHE  TIME-KILLERS  9 

The  eye  is  wearied  by  the  flat  plains  of 
North  Carolina,  relieved  only  by  negro  shan- 
ties and  scrub  pines.  By  afternoon  North 
Carolina  has  merged  into  South  Carolina. 
The  flatness  continues  with  unbounded  en- 
thusiasm; but  there  is  no  snow  and  the  air 
is  milder.  The  pines  are  marked  with  pecu- 
liar herring-bone  gashes,  whence  flows 
turpentine,  the  painter's  delight.  Piney 
odors,  vaguely  reminiscent  of  tar  soap, 
sheep  dip  and  cold-remedies,  float  through 
the  half-opened  windows.  Later  that  eve- 
ning, as  one  returns  to  the  dining-car  to 
recover  the  hat  which  one  has  forgotten  in 
the  excitement  of  tipping  the  waiter,  one 
hears  frequent  shrill  frog-choruses  from 
the  pools  beside  the  tracks.  By  midnight 
one  is  ringing  for  the  porter  to  tear  himself 
from  his  slumbers  among  the  shoes  in  the 
smoking  compartment  and  start  the  electric 
fans.  One's  rest  is  troubled  by  the  heat  and 
the  increasing  shrillness  of  the  frog-choruses. 
On  the  second  morning  the  rising  sun  dis- 


io  SUN  HUNTING 

closes  a  limitless  expanse  of  flatness,  dotted 
with  occasional  palm  trees  and  covered 
with  a  scrubby  growth  of  near-palms  or 
palmettos.  The  sun  is  hot  and  red.  A 
black  ribbon  of  asphalt  road  parallels  the 
railroad;  and  at  intervals  along  it  appear 
flocks  of  flivvers  nesting  drowsily  among 
the  palms  and  the  tin-can  tourists.  There 
is  plenty  of  glaring  white  sand,  and  plenty 
of  stagnant  water.  The  air  is  full  of  swal- 
lows, and  an  occasional  pelican  flops  lan- 
guidly alongside  the  train,  gazing  pessimis- 
tically at  the  passengers. 

(The  traveler  perspires  lightly  and  marvels 
at  the  thought  that  it  was  only  night  before 
last  when  he  slipped  on  a  piece  of  ice  and 
got  half  a  peck  of  snow  down  the  back  of 
his  neck.  He  remembers  that  it  is  a  great 
and  glorious  country — a  fact  which  his  con- 
templation of  the  antics  of  Congress  had 
caused  him  to  forget. 

Occasionally  the  train  flashes  past  little 
towns  sitting  hotly  in  the  sun  and  sand 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  11 

among  a  few  orange  and  grapefruit  trees. 
This  is  Florida,  and  the  land  looks  as  though 
it  were  worth  about  a  nickel  an  acre — just 
as  it  has  always  looked  until  some  one  devel- 
ops it  and  begins  to  sell  off  corner  lots  at  a 
paltry  five  thousand  dollars  apiece. 

Around  breakfast  time — a  mere  thirty- 
six  hours  since  the  train  emerged  from  its 
northern  blizzard  and  snow-drifts — the 
train  crosses  a  shimmering  strip  of  blue 
water  and  comes  to  rest  beside  a  hotel  that 
seems,  at  first  glance,  to  be  at  least  ten  miles 
long.  It  stretches  off  so  far  into  the  dis- 
tance that  people  up  at  the  other  end  appear 
to  be  hull-down.  In  reality  it  is  only  about 
half  a  mile  long,  and  only  about  five  hun- 
dred times  larger  than  the  Mousam  House 
at  Kennebunk,  Maine. 

On  the  station  platform  are  women  in 
satin  skirts,  gauzy  waists  and  diamond 
bracelets.  Young  men  in  white  trousers 
dash  up  and  down  the  platform  on  bicycles. 
The  air  is  soft  and  balmy.  Palm  trees 


12  SUN  HUNTING 

^*^^^ 

stretch  off  into  the  distance  in  every  direc- 
tion. Wheel-chairs,  propelled  by  dignified- 
looking  negroes  who  sit  on  bicycle-seats  di- 
rectly behind  the  chairs  and  pedal  vigorously, 
move  hither  and  yon  in  a  stately  manner. 
Through  the  palm  trees  one  catches  glimpses 
of  white  yachts  riding  at  anchor  on  blue  water. 

A  wheel-chair  stops  at  the  edge  of  the 
station  platform.  In  it  are  seated  a  digni- 
fied gentleman  in  white  flannels,  and  a  gra- 
cious lady  in  a  satin  skirt  and  a  sweater 
covered  with  neat  lightning  effects  in  red, 
green  and  orange  zigzags.  One  wonders 
whether  this  can  be  J.  Pierpont  Morgan  or 
Charley  Schwab.  Then  one  hears  the  gra- 
cious lady  whisper  excitedly  to  the  dignified 
gentleman:  "Do  you  suppose  that's  Char- 
ley Schwab  or  J.  Pierpont  Morgan  over 
there?"  and  hears  the  dignified  gentleman 
reply  in  a  hoarse  undertone:  "Shut  up,  or 
they'll  think  we're  boobs !" 

This  is  Palm  Beach,  the  very  center  of 
the  winter  time-killing  industry. 


CHAPTER  III 

OF     THE     PECULIAR     DIFFERENCES     BETWEEN     TWO 

SIDES    OF    A    LAKE OF    MONEY    ODORS — AND 

OF  THE  QUESTERS  AFTER  CHARLEY  SCHWAB 

PALM  BEACH  is  a  long  narrow  strip  of 
land  which  is  separated  from  the  mainland  by 
a  long  narrow  body  of  water  known  as  Lake 
Worth,  and  by  a  sudden  increase  in  living 
expenses.  On  the  mainland  side  of  Lake 
Worth  is  the  rising  young  city  of  West 
Palm  Beach,  where  one  is  not  afraid — as  he 
usually  is  in  Palm  Beach — to  offer  a  store- 
keeper or  a  newsboy  a  nickel  lest  he  should 
regard  it  as  some  strange,  unknown  foreign 
coin.  West  Palm  Beach  is  full  of  ordinary 
people  who  are  unacquainted  with  wheel- 
chairs and  think  nothing  of  walking  two  or 
three  blocks,  or  even  as  much  as  half  a  mile 
if  the  necessity  arises.  They  frequently  get 
along  for  days  at  a  time  without  spending 

13 


14  SUN  HUNTING 

more  than  two  dollars  and  eighty-five  cents 
a  day. 

West  Palm  Beach  has  the  same  sort  of 
climate  that  Palm  Beach  has,  but  the  air  of 
the  place  is  somehow  different.  At  Palm 
Beach  one  has  the  feeling  that  he  is  breath- 
ing the  very  same  air  that  the  world's 
greatest  bankers  and  society  people  are 
breathing,  whereas  over  in  West  Palm 
Beach  one  doesn't  know  or  care  who  has 
been  breathing  the  air.  That  is  why  so 
many  people  find  the  Palm  Beach  climate 
very  invigorating,  but  always  feel  that  the 
climate  of  West  Palm  Beach  leaves  them  a 
little  weak  and  tired. 

Palm  Beach,  then,  is  a  long  narrow  strip 
of  land  with  the  ocean  on  one  side  and 
Lake  Worth  on  the  other.  The  largest  hotel, 
which  has  room  for  thirteen  hundred  paying 
guests  at  any  one  time,  fronts  on  Lake 
Worth;  while  the  next  largest  hotel  is 
directly  across  the  narrow  strip  of  land, 
fronting  on  the  ocean.  In  between  are  golf 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  15 

links,  and  roadways  edged  with  palms  and 
avenues  of  towering,  feathery,  bluish-green 
Australian  pines  and  simple  little  cottages 
that  couldn't  have  cost  a  cent  more  than 
forty  or  fifty  thousand  dollars,  and  modest 
little  shacks  that  might  have  set  their  owners 
back  half  a  million  or  so,  and  club-houses 
and  bathing  pavilions  and  more  palms  and 
broad  white  roadways  and  men  in  white  flan- 
nels and  women  in  diamonds  and  perfumery 
and  clinging  gowns — and  more  palms. 

Over  everything  there  is  an  odor  of 
money.  Every  breeze  that  blows  is  freighted 
with  its  rich,  fragrant  musky  smell;  and 
every  person  that  one  encounters  on  the 
street  or  in  a  hotel  lobby  seems  to  be  about 
to  spend  a  lot  of  it  or  to  have  just  finished 
spending  a  lot  of  it.  Some  people  seem  to 
like  the  odor  and  some  don't  seem  to  care  so 
much  for  it.  Some,  in  fact,  seem  from  their 
expressions  to  think  that  this  money-odor 
has  a  great  deal  in  common  with  smoldering 
rubber  or  asafetida. 


16  SUN  HUNTING 

The  impression  that  Palm  Beach  is  bound 
to  make  on  any  newcomer  is  one  of  general 
discomfort.  Everybody  seems  to  be  staring 
critically  and  curiously  at  everybody  else — 
due,  of  course,  to  the  fact  that  almost  every- 
body hopes  or  suspects  that  everybody  else 
may  prove  to  be  Charley  Schwab  or  Percy 
Rockefeller  or  E.  T.  Stotesbury  or  one  of 
those  prominent  society  people  who  part 
their  names  on  the  side. 

People  who  enter  and  leave  the  hotel  din- 
ing-room don't  seem  to  know  what  to  do 
with  their  hands.  They  pretend  to  an  em- 
barrassing ease  of  manner,  which  leaves 
everybody  acutely  conscious  that  they  are 
very  uneasy.  The  people  at  the  tables  can't 
keep  their  eyes  off  the  people  at  other  tables. 
The  hotel  lobbies  are  congested  before  lunch 
and  after  dinner  with  persons  who  have  no 
interest  in  any  scenery  except  that  which 
other  people  are  wearing.  Although  the 
beach  at  Palm  Beach  is  many  miles  in  length, 
all  the  bathers,  near  bathers  and  bather- 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  17 

watchers  cram  themselves  each  noon  into  a 
few  square  yards  of  beach  and  watch  one 
another  like  a  gathering  of  lynxes. 

People  dawdle  along  the  palm-fringed 
avenues  and  stare  at  one  another  blankly  and 
questioningly.  People  sit  self-consciously 
in  wheel-chairs  and  look  searchingly  at  peo- 
ple in  other  wheel-chairs.  Bicyclists  wheel 
languidly  along  the  white  roads  and  gaze 
intently  at  every  one.  "Are  you  Charley 
Schwab?"  each  eye  seems  to  ask  mutely. 
"Are  you  one  of  the  Stotesburys?  Are  you 
anybody  ?" 


CHAPTER  IV 

OF  THE  APOTHEOSIS  OF  THE   BICYCLE OF  THE  USES 

OF  WHEEL-CHAIRS AND  OF  THE   MENTAL 

ACTIVITIES  OF  CHAIR-CHAUFFEURS 

PALM  BEACH  is  the  heaven  of  the  bicycle. 
In  other  parts  of  the  world  it  has  sunk  in 
popular  esteem  until  it  is  little  else  than  a 
conveyer  of  telegraph  boys  and  an  instru- 
ment for  the  removal  of  skin  from  children's 
knees.  But  in  Palm  Beach  it  shares  with 
the  wheel-chair  the  honor  of  being  the 
chariot  of  wealth  and  beauty. 

Flocks  of  bicycles  are  parked  beside  every 
hotel  entrance.  Broad  and  flawless  side- 
walks are  reserved  for  bicycles  and  wheel- 
chairs. The  pedestrian  who  sets  foot  on 
them  does  so  at  his  own  risk,  and  is  more 
than  apt,  if  he  does  so,  to  have  his  coat 
driven  several  inches  into  his  back  by  the 
front  wheel  of  a  bicycle. 
18 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  19 

There  is  no  bicycle  costume.  Beautiful 
lady  bicyclists  wear  anything:  rakish  sport 
clothes,  fragile  afternoon  gowns,  flowing 
costumes  with  long  capes,  and  more  extreme 
evening  gowns.  Large  numbers  of  girls 
persist  in  bicycling  while  wearing  tight 
skirts,  so  that  the  general  effect  is  some- 
what similar  to  that  of  a  pony  ballet  made 
up  as  messenger  boys. 

On  side-streets,  one  frequently  sees  the 
almost  forgotten  spectacle  of  a  frail  debu- 
tante learning  to  ride.  On  the  dance  floor 
she  would  float  along  as  lightly  as  a  tuft  of 
thistledown.  On  a  bicycle  she  wabbles  heav- 
ily and  helplessly  from  side  to  side,  collaps- 
ing at  intervals  against  her  instructor  with 
all  the  crushing  weight  of  a  California  Red- 
wood. 

The  wheel-chair  is  the  favorite  Palm 
Beach  method  of  locomotion,  and  it  is  the 
only  form  of  exercise  ever  taken  by  many 
Palm  Beach  visitors.  Many  old  inhabitants 
claim  that  wheel-chair  riding  is  excellent  for 


20  SUN  HUNTING 

the  liver,  and  devote  at  least  two  hours  to  it 
every  afternoon.  The  negro  chair  chauf- 
feurs drive  the  chair  along  by  vigorous  ped- 
aling, and  the  alternate  leg  stroke  gives  the 
chair  a  gentle  side  to  side  motion  which  acts 
as  a  mild  massage  on  the  occupant.  Two 
hours  of  such  exercise  is  considered  to  be 
about  enough  by  the  most  conservative  Palm 
Beachers.  It  is  their  belief  that  the  persons 
who  ride  for  three  hours  run  a  great  risk  of 
over-exerting  themselves. 

The  chair-chauffeurs,  in  addition  to  pos- 
sessing tireless  legs,  are  usually  supplied 
with  a  vast  fund  of  knowledge.  This  is  most 
desirable ;  for  many  visitors  speak  to  no  one 
except  the  hotel  clerks,  the  news-stand  girls, 
the  waiters  and  their  wheel-chair  chauffeurs 
during  their  entire  stay.  It  frequently  hap- 
pens that  their  chair  chauffeurs  are  their 
only  guides,  philosophers  and  friends ;  so  the 
chauffeurs  find  it  very  valuable  to  be  fairly 
familiar  with  all  Palm  Beach  estates,  to  have 
a  comprehensive  grasp  of  the  flora  and 


4 
I 

PQ 

(2 
•8 


o 

a 
I 
.1 


Bradley's,  the  Monte  Carlo  of  America. 


The  Casino  at  Palm  Beach,  where  the  photographer 
favorites  reading  from  left  to  right. 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  21 

fauna  of  the  south,  and  to  be  conversant 
with  all  financial  and  social  matters  apper- 
taining to  the  old-timer.  They  have  also 
found  that  a  frank  exposition  of  their  own 
philosophical  meditations  on  men  and  things 
will  sometimes  arouse  the  interest  and  stimu- 
late the  generosity  of  their  charges.  "What 
sort  of  ducks  are  those,  George?"  usually 
brings  the  intelligent  answer :  "Those  ain't 
no  sort,  suh.  Those  is  just  ducks."  A 
query  as  to  whether  a  wheel-chair  is  harder 
to  push  with  one  or  two  people  in  it  brought 
the  reply  that  there  "wasn't  no  difference." 
But  to  push  an  empty  one  is  the  hardest. 
Yes,  suh!  Must  be  because  no  money  is 
being  made.  [Yes,  suh! 


CHAPTER  V 

OF       THE       TELEGRAM-EXPECTERS OF       THE       DATE- 

GUESSERS — AND    OF    THE     STATISTIC-WEEVILS 

THERE  are  many  lonely  men  and  women 
at  Palm  Beach  who  almost  cry  with  grati- 
tude when  somebody  speaks  to  them.  They 
are  like  many  Congressmen,  who  are  big 
people  at  home,  but  of  less  account  in  Wash- 
ington than  a  head  porter.  Out  of  all  the 
people  who  flock  to  Palm  Beach  to  spend 
large  amounts  of  money  and  bask  in  the 
soothing  rays  that  emanate  from  the  socially 
prominent,  ninety  per  cent,  might  be  com- 
pared to  very  small  potatoes  in  a  two  hun- 
dred-acre lot.  Even  the  majority  of  the  peo- 
ple whose  names  are  names  to  conjure  with 
in  Palm  Beach  society  can't  be  found  in  the 
pages  of  Who's  Who. 

The  majority  of  men  who  pay  the  bills  at 
the  big  hotels  are  forced  to  struggle  hard  to 
kill  time  when  they  have  finished  their  golf- 
22 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  23 

playing  for  the  day.  Enormous  numbers  of 
them  seem  to  spend  most  of  their  spare  time 
sitting  dolefully  around  hotel  lobbies  and 
expecting  telegrams  that  never  come.  If 
you  fall  into  conversation  with  any  man  in 
any  Palm  Beach  hotel  lobby,  he  invariably 
explains  his  inactivity  by  saying  that  he  is 
expecting  a  telegram. 

Next  to  expecting  telegrams,  the  most 
popular  Palm  Beach  time-killer  seems  to 
consist  of  wondering  what  day  of  the  week 
it  is.  Sneak  up  behind  any  two  important- 
looking  men  who  seem  to  be  discussing  af- 
fairs of  moment,  and  the  chances  are  ten  to 
one  that  you  will  hear  the  following  weighty 
conversation : 

"Is  to-day  Tuesday  or  Wednesday?  I 
sort  of  lose  track  down  here." 

"To-day?  Why  to-day's  Wednesday. 
No;  hold  on!  It's  Thursday,  isn't  it?" 

"No,  I  don't  think  so.  I  think  it's  either 
Tuesday  or  Wednesday.  Still,  I  don't 
know :  it  might  be  Thursday." 


24  SUN  HUNTING 

"No,  I  don't  believe  it's  Thursday.  I  was 
expecting  a  telegram  on  Tuesday,  and  it 
would  have  had  to  come  before  Thursday. 
I  guess  it's  Wednesday." 

"Yes,  I  guess  it  is.  I  thought  for  a  while 
it  was  Tuesday." 

"Oh,  I  don't  believe  it's  Tuesday." 

"No,  I  guess  it's  Wednesday,  all  right. 
That  telegram  ought  to  be  here  by  now. 
How  long  are  you  staying  here?" 

"I  don't  know.  I'm  expecting  a  telegram 
and  I  can't  tell  till  it  gets  here." 

Having  reached  a  comparatively  ripe  inti- 
macy by  this  time,  it  is  almost  inevitable  that 
one  of  them  should  advance  one  of  the  thou- 
sand statistical  questions  that  are  so  fre- 
quently encountered  at  Palm  Beach,  such  as 
"Did  you  ever  stop  to  think  how  many  nails 
it  took  to  build  this  hotel  ?"  A  few  seconds 
later  both  of  them  have  produced  envelopes 
and  are  figuring  busily. 

Men  who  have  traveled  thousands  of 
miles  for  the  purpose  of  killing  time  at  Palm 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  25 

Beach  will  frequently  argue  for  two  or  three 
hours,  and  figure  all  over  the  backs  of  eight 
or  ten  envelopes  and  a  couple  of  golf  scores 
in  an  attempt  to  decide  whether  or  not  the 
value  of  all  the  diamond  bracelets  in  Palm 
Beach  would  be  sufficient  to  secure  eco- 
nomic control  of  Russia.  Newcomers  to 
Palm  Beach,  knowing  that  America's  great- 
est financiers  flock  there  during  the  season, 
frequently  make  the  mistake  of  thinking 
that  two  men  knitting  their  brows  over  a 
lot  of  figures  are  probably  two  great  money- 
kings  working  up  a  scheme  to  corner  the  na- 
tion's hop  crop.  In  reality  they  are  two 
ordinary  citizens  killing  a  little  time  by 
choking  it  to  death  with  useless  statistics. 


CHAPTER  VI 

OF  THE  CHANGING  OF  CLOTHES OF  THE  WAY  THEY 

WEAR  'EM AND  OF  THE  FEMALES  OF  THE 

DRESS-FERRET  SPECIES 

COMPARED  with  the  good  old  days  when 
dresses  hooked  up  the  back  in  such  an 
intricate  fashion  that  one  needed  blueprints, 
diagrams  and  charts  in  order  to  hook  up  a 
dress  properly,  there  is  practically  no  dress- 
changing  at  Palm  Beach  nowadays.  In  the 
old  days  the  womenfolk  spent  at  least  forty 
per  cent,  of  their  waking  hours  changing 
their  clothes.  They  changed  their  clothes 
whenever  the  wind  changed.  They  changed 
their  clothes  every  time  a  train  came  in.  They 
couldn't  eat  or  go  out  in  a  wheel-chair  or 
put  on  a  string  of  beads  or  take  a  drink 
without  changing  their  clothes.  Their 
menfolk  were  kept  constantly  busy  hooking 
them  up  the  back. 

26 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  27 

To-day  things  are  different.  Dresses  no 
longer  hook  up  the  back  with  their  erstwhile 
whole-heartedness.  Careful  and  competent 
observers  state  that  many  present-day 
dresses  are  safely  attached  to  the  human 
frame  by  as  few  as  three  hooks,  all  of  which 
can  be  reached  without  dislocating  an  arm 
or  displacing  any  vertebrae,  and  that  an 
equal  number  of  dresses  are  merely  slid  on 
over  the  head  and  worn  just  as  they  fall, 
without  any  further  formality.  A  great 
many  women  at  Palm  Beach  wear  only  two 
costumes  each  day — one  for  morning  and 
afternoon  that  shows  almost  everything  be- 
low the  hips  and  one  for  evening  that  shows 
almost  everything  above  the  waist. 

Not  so  many  years  ago  a  woman  who  wore 
only  two  dresses  in  one  day  at  Palm  Beach 
would  have  been  regarded  as  mentally  un- 
balanced or  disgustingly  pauperized. 

The  real  snappy  dressers,  however,  get  in 
and  out  of  three  costumes  a  day;  while  it  is 
not  at  all  unusual  to  find  prominent  society 


28  SUN  HUNTING 

camp-followers  staggering  in  and  out  of  as 
many  as  five  and  six  daily  costumes.  How 
they  ever  do  it  will  ever  remain  a  mystery  to 
us  simple  writers  and  oatmeal-manufactur- 
ers and  mattress-makers  from  the  buck- 
wheat belt. 

Every  morning  directly  after  breakfast, 
the  hotel  lobbies  fill  up  with  women  who 
want  to  talk  about  dress.  The  Palm  Beach 
dailies  and  weeklies  cater  to  their  pitiable 
weakness  by  specializing  on  thrilling  infor- 
mation of  this  nature.  So  far  as  the  female 
contingent  at  Palm  Beach  is  concerned,  an 
economic  conference  in  Europe  or  a  presiden- 
tial utterance  on  the  Bonus  hasn't  a  chance 
with  such  news  as  what  Mrs.  Harry  Payne 
Whitney  wore  at  the  Beach  Club  last  night. 

Outside  the  warm  sun  may  be  beating 
down  upon  golden  sands  and  an  azure  sea, 
the  wind  rustling  softly  through  the  palms 
and  the  bland  air  thrilling  to  the  melodious 
murmur  of  the  wheel-chair  boys  as  they 
point  out  the  Stotesbury  cottage  with  caus- 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  29 

tic  comments  on  the  height  of  the  Stotesbury 
wall.  Yet  the  dress-ferrets  sit  on  with 
bated  breaths  in  the  cool  gloom  of  the  hotel 
lobbies  while  the  papers  inform  their  en- 
thralled readers  that: 

"Very  smart  was  the  slate  colored  strictly 
tailored  suit  worn  by  Mrs.  Aurelius  Vander- 
souse,  Jr.,  at  a  recent  Poinciana  luncheon. 
Her  hat  was  of  a  tone  of  straw  perfectly 
harmonizing  with  the  suit  and  bore  only  a 
flat  bow  of  tomato-wire  for  trimming.  The 
Honorable  Mrs.  D.  Dryver  Flubyer's  suit 
was  fashioned  of  an  imported  bed-ticking 
fabric  guiltless  of  any  embellishment.  Her 
chapeau  was  fashioned  of  the  same  fabric. 
Mrs.  J.  Eaton  Swank  wore  a  clinging  gown 
of  f  romage-de-brie  crepe  in  a  light  heliotrope 
shade,  fashioned  in  a  one-piece  style,  with 
flowing  sleeves  and  uneven  hem,  whose  folds 
clung  gracefully  to  the  tall  slender  wearer." 

That's  the  stuff  to  give  the  Palm  Beach 
Battalion  of  Dress.  Like  Bosco,  they  eat  it 
alive.  They  are  veritable  cormorants  for  it. 


CHAPTER  VII 

OF     THE     FASCINATIONS     OF     THE     BEACH OF     THE 

SAND-HOUNDS   FROM   ODESSA  AND   ELSEWHERE 
— AND    OF   PRUDES   AND    STYLISH    STOUTS 

Ax  HALF  past  eleven  every  morning,  stimu- 
lated by  the  early  morning  talk  of  dress,  all 
the  feminine  population  of  Palm  Beach,  ac- 
companied by  all  obtainable  male  escorts,  set 
out  from  their  hotels  and  homes  in  wheel- 
chairs for  their  daily  pilgrimage  to  the 
beach. 

The  beach  is  not  prized  by  Palm  Beach 
visitors  because  of  its  bathing  facilities,  but 
because  of  the  perfect  spirit  of  camaraderie 
and  democracy  which  reigns  there.  A 
Philadelphia  Biddle  is  just  as  apt  as  not  to 
come  along  and  accidentally  rub  damp  sand 
on  a  South  Bend  Smith.  Anything  may 
happen.  A  Vanderbilt  may  ask  you  what 
time  it  is. 

30 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  31 

There  is  no  distinction  on  the  beach  itself 
between  the  people  who  emigrated  from 
Montana  to  Fifth  Avenue  back  in  '01  and 
the  people  who  emigrated  from  Odessa  to 
Houston  Street  back  in  '91.  Both  of  them 
have  the  same  funny  knobs  on  their  knees; 
and  there  are  lots  of  them — especially  of  the 
Odessa  set. 

The  beach  is  the  only  place  in  Palm  Beach 
where  everybody  has  an  equal  chance;  and 
there  everybody  uses  the  same  ocean  and  sits 
around  in  the  same  sand  in  almost  hopeless 
confusion.  Things  are  so  congested  that  if 
one  leans  back  carelessly  and  braces  himself 
by  sticking  his  hand  down  in  the  sand,  the 
chances  are  excellent  that  a  couple  of  ladies 
from  Kansas  City  or  Boston  will  come 
staggering  along  with  their  eyes  fixed  raptly 
on  Mrs.  B.  Gurney  Munn  or  Mrs.  Jerome 
Bonaparte  and  sheer  off  two  or  three  of  one's 
fingers  with  their  French  heels. 

The  only  portion  of  the  beach  which  any- 
body considers  worth  using  is  the  portion 


32  SUN  HUNTING 

directly  in  front  of  the  casino,  which  is  a 
large,  gorgeous,  white  plaster  bath-house 
with  an  outdoor  swimming  pool  and  polite 
attendants  who  are  always  appearing  at 
inopportune  moments  and  helping  patrons  to 
do  things  which  they  could  do  much  better 
alone — such,  for  example,  as  removing  a 
towel  from  a  hook  or  lifting  a  brush  and 
comb  from  a  shelf. 

Many  people  garbed  in  elaborate  dresses 
stand  on  the  terrace  in  front  of  the  casino 
and  stare  down  at  the  people  on  the  beach, 
while  the  people  on  the  beach  stare  up  at 
them.  On  chairs  on  the  beach  there  are 
many  other  elaborately  gowned  women  who 
examine  every  one  closely  and  are  closely 
examined  by  every  one. 

Down  in  front  of  the  entire  mob  stand 
large  numbers  of  professional  photogra- 
phers who  keep  a  careful  lookout  for  exciting 
costumes  and  prominent  faces,  and  con- 
stantly snap  little  groups  of  laughing  people 
who  subsequently  appear  in  leading  Sunday 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  33 

papers  or  monthly  magazines  over  legends 
like:  "Far  from  Northern  Snows:  a  happy 
society  group  on  the  Palm  Beach  sands: 
from  left  to  right,  J.  Edge  Smush,  Mrs.  B. 
Goodwin  Eezy,  the  Honorable  Mrs.  Claribel 
Custard,  I.  Winken  Ogle,  Miss  Patricia 
Swaddle.  Behind  the  feet  at  the  right, 
Perry  Peevish,  Jr." 

Every  little  while  the  photographers  find 
some  one  who  is  prominent  and  pretty  with- 
out being  too  much  overweight  and  over- 
dressed ;  and  when  they  do,  they  coax  her  out 
to  an  unoccupied  section  of  beach  and 
arrange  her  in  a  position  of  unstudied  ease 
and  graceful  carelessness,  and  shoot  half  a 
dozen  pictures  of  her  admiring  the  distant 
horizon  with  a  gay,  unaffected,  girlish 
laugh. 

Everything  on  the  beach  is  so  simple  and 
natural  and  wholesome  that  one  can't  help 
but  like  it.  Then,  too,  one  never  gets  that 
offensive,  salty,  seaweedy  odor  of  ocean 
that  one  is  apt  to  get  on  the  New  England 


34  SUN  HUNTING 

coast,  owing  to  the  ocean  odors  being  com- 
pletely overwhelmed  by  the  rare  and  power- 
ful French  perfumes  that  are  worn  by  many 
elements  of  Palm  Beach  society.  If  one 
closed  his  eyes,  he  might  think  that  he  was 
at  a  perfumery  show  and  that  somebody  had 
kicked  over  all  the  bottles. 

Palm  Beach  is  not  exactly  what  one  would 
call  a  Prude's  Paradise,  but  a  prude  can  feel 
more  at  ease  on  the  beach  at  Palm  Beach 
than  at  any  other  resort  in  Florida.  This  is 
due  to  the  fact  that  women  are  not  allowed 
to  appear  on  the  beach  with  any  portion  of 
the  leg  uncovered.  A  policeman  is  stationed 
on  the  beach  to  see  that  this  rule  is  enforced, 
and  there  is  a  great  rejoicing  among  all  the 
local  prudes,  who — like  all  prudes  through- 
out the  world — see  evil  where  there  is  none, 
and  pass  blindly  by  the  evils  that  every  one 
except  themselves  can  see. 

This  rule  has  brought  about  one  great 
benefit  in  that  it  has  prevented  large  num- 
bers of  ill-advised  and  otherwise  charming 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  35 

stylish  stouts  from  rolling  down  their  bath- 
ing stockings  and  exposing  too  much  knee. 
Any  rule  that  does  this  is  a  good  rule — and 
it  is  generally  agreed  that  there  are  more 
stylish  stouts  at  Palm  Beach  than  at  any 
other  resort  on  earth. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

OF  THE  THREE  DAY  SUCKERS OF  TRUE  SMARTNESS — • 

AND  OF  THE  BUCKWHEATS  AND  THE  DEAD-LINE 

WHEN  the  bathing  hour  has  passed  into 
history,  the  merry  bathers  and  clothes-wear- 
ers sally  forth  in  search  of  lunch.  The  ordi- 
nary run  of  Palm  Beach  visitors  eat  their 
lunch  at  their  hotels.  This  act  almost  auto- 
matically stamps  them  as  Buckwheats,  or 
Three  Day  Suckers,  or  people  who  aren't 
Smart.  A  Buckwheat  is  a  coarse,  rude,  bar- 
baric person  who  is  addicted  to  the  secret 
and  loathsome  vices  of  eating  buckwheat 
cakes  for  breakfast  and  not  spending  money 
recklessly. 

A  Three  Day  Sucker  is  a  person  who  only 
stays  a  few  days  at  Palm  Beach.  As  a  time- 
killer  he  is  not  regarded  with  any  respect. 
He  travels  so  far  to  kill  time  that  he  hasn't 

36 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  37 

any  time  left  to  kill  when  he  gets  there.  This 
is  not  regarded  as  smart.  Any  one  who 
stays  less  than  two  weeks  is  not  viewed  with 
favor  by  people  who  stay  a  month  or  more, 
and  who  know  how  important  smartness  is. 
If  one  wishes  to  have  the  respect  of  the 
cigar-counter  clerks  and  the  mail  clerks  and 
the  head  waiters  and  other  Palm  Beach 
people  who — as  the  ultra-refined  advertise- 
ments say — matter,  one  must  above  all 
things  be  smart.  You  might  as  well  be 
dead  at  Palm  Beach  as  not  be  smart. 

Certain  things  are  smart  and  certain 
things  are  not  smart.  It  is  smart,  for 
example,  for  a  man  to  go  without  a  hat.  It 
is  smart  to  ride  a  bicycle.  Any  article  of 
feminine  wearing  apparel  that  is  essentially 
useless  is  smart.  It  is  smart  to  speak  of  a 
thing  as  smart.  It  is  not  at  all  smart  to  tell 
a  Palm  Beacher  that  you  would  gladly  dis- 
embowel him  when  you  hear  him  use  the 
word  "smart"  for  the  fiftieth  time. 

None  of  the  big  Palm  Beach  hotels  rents 


38  SUN  HUNTING 

rooms  without  meals.  One  must  pay  for  his 
meals  as  well.  Two  people  at  most  of  the 
big  hotels  pay  a  minimum  rate  of  about 
thirty- five  dollars  a  day  for  the  two — which 
is  about  the  amount  from  which  the  same 
people  would  have  to  separate  themselves  at 
any  of  the  big  New  York  or  Chicago  or  Bos- 
ton or  Washington  hotels  by  the  time  they 
had  finished  paying  for  their  food.  But  if 
one  wishes  to  be  smart  at  Palm  Beach,  one 
mustn't  lunch  or  dine  at  the  hotel  where 
one's  meals  are  included  on  his  bill.  It  is 
very  buckwheat  to  do  such  a  thing:  very 
uncouth:  very  hick  and  very  rough-neck: 
not,  in  a  word,  smart.  That  is  why  the  de- 
sirable Palm  Beach  habitues,  at  the  height 
of  the  season,  find  it  difficult  to  spend  less 
than  a  hundred  dollars  apiece  per  day.  One 
can't  indulge  in  games  of  chance  or  keep 
many  wheel-chairs  on  that  amount;  but  if 
one  is  reasonably  careful  and  content  to  be 
only  moderately  smart,  one  can  get  along 
fairly  well  for  a  hundred  dollars  a  day. 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  39 

The  truly  smart  person  strives  always  to 
pay  for  two  meals  where  one  would  nor- 
mally be  paid  for.  He  strives  to  pay  for  one 
that  he  eats  and  for  one  that  nobody  eats. 
If  one  is  living  at  the  Poinciana,  one  should 
make  an  effort  to  lunch  or  dine  at  the  Break- 
ers or  at  the  Country  Club  or  at  the  Beach 
Club  or  at  the  Everglades  Club,  or  one  of 
the  cottages.  It  is  a  fascinating  system, 
and  is  based  on  the  familiar  society  theory 
that  the  more  useless  a  thing  is,  the  smarter 
it  is. 

One  of  the  smartest— in  a  society  sense — 
of  all  the  persons  that  come  to  Palm  Beach 
is  a  man  who  never  eats  at  the  hotel  where 
he  lives,  and  who  keeps  a  flock  of  twelve 
wheel-chairs  always  in  attendance  on  him. 
Day  and  night  his  twelve  wheel-chairs  are 
waiting  for  him  and  his  friends.  They  are 
used  about  an  hour  a  day — but  it  is  very 
smart  to  keep  them  waiting:  frightfully 
smart.  Useless  and  therefore  smart. 

[The  head  waiters  in  the  restaurants  be- 


40  SUN  HUNTING 

come  very  proficient  at  distinguishing  those 
who  are  smart  from  those  who  are  not 
smart.  In  the  dining-room  of  the  largest 
hotel  there  is  a  cross-strip  of  green  carpet 
which  is  known  as  the  dead-line.  The  people 
who  sit  between  the  entrance  and  the  dead- 
line have  been  carefully  looked  over  by  the 
head  waiter  and  put  in  the  smart  class.  But 
the  people  who  are  put  on  the  kitchen  side 
of  the  dead-line  are  dubs  and  Buckwheats 
in  the  judgment  of  the  head  waiter.  Once 
people  are  put  below  the  dead-line,  they 
rarely  have  a  chance  to  come  up  for  air,  but 
are  doomed  to  stay  down  among  the  other 
Buckwheats  for  the  remainder  of  their  visit. 


CHAPTER  IX 

OF     THE     SMARTEST     THING     IN     PALM     BEACH OF 

LARGE  AMOUNTS  OF  MONEY — AND  OF  THE  OLD  GUARD 

THE  smartest  thing  at  Palm  Beach  is  the 
Everglades  Club.  The  Everglades  Club  is 
so  smart  that  it  almost  gives  itself  a  pain. 
It  has  only  a  few  over  four  hundred  mem- 
bers, but  these  four  hundred  include  names 
that  make  a  society  editor's  scalp  tingle,  and 
control  so  much  money  and  jewels  that  the 
mere  mention  of  them  is  enough  to  make 
any  normal  burglar  tremble  all  over. 

The  Everglades  Club  building  was  started 
in  the  summer  of  1918  by  Paris  Singer,  who 
is  a  wealthy  society  man,  as  a  hospital  for 
convalescent  officers.  The  war  was  over, 
however,  before  the  building  was  ever  used 
as  a  hospital ;  and  it  immediately  occurred  to 
the  smartest  of  the  Palm  Beach  colony  that 

41 


42  SUN  HUNTING 

the  building  was  exactly  the  thing  to  use  for 
a  smart  club  where  really  smart  people  could 
go  off  by  themselves  and  be  too  exclusive  for 
words.  The  proposition  was  put  up  to  Paris 
Singer,  who  saw  the  force  of  it;  and  that's 
how  the  Everglades  Club  started.  The  ini- 
tiation fee  and  yearly  dues  might  be  ex- 
pected to  be  about  as  large  as  the  national 
debt,  but  in  reality  they  amount  to  some- 
thing like  one  hundred  dollars  initiation  fee 
and  fifty  dollars  yearly  dues.  The  club  has 
built  a  very  smart  and  attractive  apartment- 
house  within  a  stone's  throw  of  the  parent 
building;  and  in  it  club  members  can  rent 
small  but  smart  apartments  for  a  mere 
twenty-five  hundred  dollars  a  season — and 
there  are  several  Maine  summer  resorts 
where  one  pays  as  much  and  gets  much  less 
for  his  money. 

The  club  has  its  own  golf  links  and  tennis 
courts;  and  it  has  a  restaurant  whose  chef 
could  easily  enter  a  cheffing  contest  with 
the  leading  Parisian  chefs  with  an  excellent 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  43 

chance  to  win  the  diamond-studded  skillet, 
or  the  seventeen- jeweled  egg-beater.  It  is 
my  fixed  belief  that  if  old  M'sieu  Mar- 
guery, who  invented  Filet  of  Sole  Marguery, 
could  have  been  led  into  the  dining-room  of 
the  Everglades  Club  and  placed  where  he 
could  look  out  through  the  palms  to  the  pla- 
cid waters  of  Lake  Worth,  and  handed  a 
platter  of  Pompano  Meuniere — it  is  my  fixed 
belief,  I  say,  that  old  M'sieu  Marguery 
would  have  put  his  head  down  in  his  hands 
and  cried  like  a  child  to  think  that  he  could 
have  doubled  his  fortune  if  he  could  have 
started  serving  Pompano  that  way  thirty 
years  ago. 

The  interior  fixtures  of  the  Everglades 
Club  are  of  the  proper  sort  to  go  with  such 
food.  The  walls  are  hung  with  sixteenth 
century  tapestries,  and  the  dining-room  is 
wainscoted  with  oak  from  the  interior  of  a 
Spanish  monastery. 

There  was  some  talk  at  one  time  of  cover- 
ing the  wall  of  one  room  with  silver  plates 


44  SUN  HUNTING 

made  by  flattening  the  silver  cocktail  shakers 
of  the  club  members.  This  was  never  done, 
however;  and  it  is  probable  that  the  mem- 
bers found  other  uses  for  their  shakers. 

It  would  be  idle  to  attempt  to  estimate 
with  any  accuracy  the  amount  of  money 
represented  by  members  of  the  Everglades 
Club.  If  they  were  pushed,  they  could  easily 
dig  up  one  billion  dollars  among  them. 

While  we  are  speaking  in  billions  instead 
of  in  mere  beggarly  millions,  it  might  be 
appropriate  to  mention  that  the  most  astute 
Palm  Beach  estimaters  figure  that  the  thir- 
teen hundred  guests  who  fill  the  Royal 
Poinciana  Hotel  at  the  height  of  the  season, 
if  placed  in  one  room  and  carefully  assayed, 
would  yield  at  least  two  billion  dollars. 

The  Country  Club  is  another  smart  place 
at  which  to  lunch  or  dine.  There  is  no 
restaurant  in  Europe  to  my  knowledge  that 
is  able  to  produce  a  better  dinner  than  the 
Palm  Beach  Country  Club,  especially  if  one 
leaves  it,  as  the  saying  goes,  to  Francois. 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  45 

Frangois  is  the  head  waiter ;  and  he  works  in 
conjunction  with  a  chef  named  Marius,  who 
inherited  most  of  his  recipes  from  a  gifted 

relative  in  the  south  of  France,  and  who 

s 

spends  a  large  part  of  his  time  when  not 

cooking  in  fearing  that  somebody  will  solve 
the  recipes.  The  chief  object  of  the  Coun- 
try Club  is  to  provide  a  golfing  retreat  from 
the  Buckwheats  and  the  Three  Day  Suck- 
ers, who  usually  break  for  the  hotel  golf 
links  immediately  on  arrival.  Consequently 
the  links  which  are  open  to  the  Buckwheats 
are  apt  to  become  so  congested  that  if  one 
cloesn't  stick  rigidly  in  his  place  in  the  golf 
procession,  he  is  more  than  apt  to  get  a 
couple  of  golf  balls  in  the  side  of  the  head 
and  then  have  to  stand  aside  for  two  hours 
while  a  long  parade  of  golfers  and  near- 
golfers  hacks  its  way  past  him.  So  the 
smart  golfers  go  to  the  Country  Club.  It  is 
there  that  one  finds  the  Old  Guard  of  Palm 
Beach. 

The  Old  Guard  is  a  hide-bound  organiza- 


46  SUN  HUNTING 

tion  of  ardent  golfers  who  know  all  the  in- 
timate personal  scandal  about  practically 
every  dollar  that  has  changed  hands  in  NortH 
America  since  the  Dutch  purchased  Manhat- 
tan Island  from  the  Indians  for  twenty- 
four  dollars,  and  threw  in  enough  rum  to 
provide  magnificent  hang-overs  for  the 
families  of  the  original  owners. 

One  must  have  been  a  resident  of  Palm 
Beach  for  five  years  before  he  is  allowed  to 
join  the  Old  Guard,  the  theory  being  that 
unless  a  golfer  has  lived  there  for  five  years, 
he  is  not  thoroughly  conversant  with  the 
essential  features  of  Palm  Beach  gossip  an'd 
will  be  apt  to  interrupt  a  calm  and  quiet  game 
of  golf  to  ask  who  the  G.  Daley  Squabbles 
are  going  to  marry  when  they  have  divorced 
each  other,  or  some  other  equally  irrelevant 
and  unnecessary  question. 


CHAPTER  X 

OF  THOSE  WHO  WISH  TO  CRASH  INTO  SOCIETY — AND 

OF  THOSE  WHO  FURNISH  THE  PALPITATING 

SOCIETY  ITEMS 

THE  business  of  being  smart  and  appear- 
ing at  the  proper  places  at  the  proper  hour 
is  merely  the  accepted  method  of  killing 
time  with  many  Palm  Beachers;  but  with 
many  others  it  is  as  serious  as  the  death  of  a 
near  relative.  Palm  Beach  is  well  sprinkled 
with  people  who  are  determined  to  break  into 
New  York  society,  and  who  have  selected 
Palm  Beach  as  the  place  to  drive  the  enter- 
ing wedge  because  results  can  be  obtained 
there  with  greater  speed,  with  less  expense 
and  with  more  noise  than  in  any  other  sec- 
tion of  the  country. 

A  young  New  Yorker  with  a  small  income 
broke  into  society  with  a  crash  and  married, 
not  so  very  long  ago,  a  beautiful  widow 

47 


48  SUN  HUNTING 

with  a  strangle-hold  on  society  and  a  fortune 
that  kept  a  couple  of  income  tax  experts 
working  a  month  each  year.  He  explained 
his  system  to  a  friend  of  mine  with  the  pecu- 
liar half  childish  and  half  idiotic  frankness 
that  may  frequently  be  encountered  in  the 
upper  crust  of  society.  If  he  had  attempted 
to  break  in  by  way  of  New  York,  he  said, 
he  would  have  spent  all  his  money  on  din- 
ners and  luncheons;  and  about  as  much  no- 
tice would  have  been  taken  of  his  struggles 
as  would  be  taken  of  a  stray  dish  of  prunes 
at  a  banquet.  But  by  coming  to  Palm  Beach 
and  getting  on  the  right  side  of  the  society 
reporters,  he  was  able  to  give  one  fair-sized 
and  comparatively  inexpensive  luncheon  and 
have  the  news  telegraphed  immediately  to 
the  New  York  papers.  By  doing  this  a 
couple  of  times  a  season,  he  was  able  to 
repay  all  the  invitations  which  he  accepted 
in  New  York;  and  it  was  apparent  to  all 
New  York  newspaper  readers  that  he  was 
making  a  society  splash  at  Palm  Beach.  So 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  49 

he  was  soon  accepted  as  being  socially  promi- 
nent, whereupon  he  picked  out  the  richest 
thing  in  sight,  married  it  and  stopped  worry- 
ing. 

Many  people  at  Palm  Beach  feel  that  they 
must  have  press  agents  to  keep  them  in  the 
limelight.  There  is  one  enterprising  Palm 
Beach  press  agent  who  supplies  the  news- 
papers with  palpitating  items  about  seven 
or  eight  social  climbers,  and  whose  earnings 
from  this  source  are  over  thirty  thousand  a 
year.  When  one  reads  of  a  socially  promi- 
nent Palm  Beacher  doing  something  fear- 
fully original,  like  giving  a  dinner  to  all  her 
friends'  dogs,  one  may  know  that  she  has 
been  hiring  a  press  agent  to  fill  her  mind 
with  valuable  ideas. 


CHAPTER  XI 

OF  THE  ALIBI  WINDOW — OF  THE  TRICK  FLASKS  AND 

CANES — OF  DRINKERS    FRAIL  AND  FAT — AND   OF 

ONE  CONCEPTION  OF  SIMPLICITY 

THE  Palm  Beach  crowd  is  always  ready 
to  part  with  money  for  anything  that  looks 
sufficiently  smart  and  interesting.  In  order 
to  facilitate  the  parting,  some  of  the  coun- 
try's leading  costumers  and  rug  merchants 
and  hat  makers  and  jewelers  have  moved 

their  branch  stores  into  the  hotel  lobbies,  so 

7 

that  the  passers-by  can  separate  themselves 
from  their  money  with  a  minimum  of  exer- 
tion. 

There  is  one  Palm  Beach  window  that  is 
known  as  the  Alibi  Window.  It  is  full 
of  gorgeous  diamond  pendants  and  diamond 
bracelets  and  simple  little  ten-thousand-dol- 
lar rings ;  and  the  Palm  Beach  theory  is  that 
the  shop's  best  customers  are  men  who  have 

50 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  51 

been  raising  what  is  somewhat  loosely 
known  as  the  dickens.  As  is  well  known,  a 
man  whose  conscience  is  troubling  him  can 
frequently  keep  it  quiet  by  getting  his  wife 
a  pendant  of  diamonds  set  in  platinum.  At 
night,  when  the  shop  is  locked  up,  all  the 
jewelry  is  removed  from  the  window  and 
replaced  with  a  large  flock  of  frosted  silver 
cocktail-shakers  whose  appearance  alone  is 
warranted  to  give  even  a  Prohibition  En- 
forcement Agent  a  thirst.  This  spectacle  is 
supposed  to  make  the  observer  hunt  up 
some  whisky  and  get  himself  nicely  boiled, 
and  possibly  to  make  him  fall  so  low  as  to 
speak  disrespectfully  of  the  society  leaders. 
On  the  following  day  he  buys  jewelry  to 
square  himself  with  his  wife. 

Large,  curved  pocket  flasks,  two  of  which 
would  make  fine  protective  armor  for  the 
entire  upper  part  of  the  body  if  worn  on 
opposite  sides,  are  popular  at  Palm  BeacB, 
as  is  a  new  trick  cane  that  unscrews  at  a 
joint  and  reveals  a  long,  slender  bottle  three- 


52  SUN  HUNTING 

quarters  of  an  inch  in  diameter  and  two 
feet  long.  The  popularity  of  these  canes, 
which  come  in  half-pint  and  pint  sizes,  in- 
dicate clearly  that  some  enterprising  hat 
manufacturer  will  soon  get  out  a  two-pint 
straw  hat  for  Florida  wear. 

There  is  a  great  deal  of  fire-water  in 
sight  at  Palm  Beach  at  all  hours  of  the  day 
and  night;  and  the  debutante  who  can't 
absorb  eight  cocktails  without  raising  her 
voice  or  falling  over  the  chairs  is  regarded 
as  being  handicapped  by  some  sort  of  inher- 
ited weakness.  One  of  the  most  frequently 
pointed-out  personages  at  Palm  Beach  is  a 
very  fat  man  who  can — according  to  the 
claims  made  for  him  by  his  admirers — 
drink  thirty-five  cocktails  at  one  sitting 
without  blinking.  The  price  of  Scotch 
whisky  starts  down  around  forty  dollars  a 
case  in  the  summer  time  and  works  grad- 
ually upward  until  at  the  height  of  the  sea- 
son one  is  paying  from  seventy  to  one  hun- 
dred dollars  a  case  for  it. 


,THE  TIME-KILLERS  53 

The  building-boom  that  has  struck  Palm 
Beach  in  the  last  five  years  is  claimed  by 
most  of  the  loose  claimers  and  enthusiastic 
drinkers  to  be  due  to  Prohibition.  A  great 
many  cottages  have  been  erected  by  persons 
of  wealth  and  social  prominence  in  these 
five  years;  and  the  prevalent  architectural 
idea  for  a  simple  little  Palm  Beach  cottage 
seems  to  be  a  Spanish  modification  of  a 
Union  Station,  or  a  Court  of  Jewels  at  a 
successful  World's  Fair. 

To  hear  the  drinkers  tell  it,  these  houses 
have  been  built  so  that  the  owners  could 
have  a  place  in  which  to  drink  without  being 
watched  or  hurried  or  made  to  feel  uncom- 
fortable. This  may  be  possible ;  but  if  it  is, 
the  house  builders  are  the  only  ones  who 
haven't  felt  free  to  drink  when  and  where 
they  choose. 

The  truth  of  the  matter  unquestionably  is 
that  the  people  who  built  houses  liked  the 
place  and  the  climate,  and  so  built  in  order 
to  enjoy  them  more  thoroughly  than  they 


54  SUN  HUNTING 

could  be  enjoyed  in  a  hotel  room  smelling 
faintly  of  damp  carpets  and  previous  occu- 
pants. 


CHAPTER  XII 

OF  NUTS  IN    THE   COCONUT   GROVE — OF  BRADLEY^S— - 

OF  THE  RELAXATION  AND  AMUSEMENT  OF  THE 

BEACH    CLUB-FELLOWS — AND   OF  GAMBLING 

IN  GENERAL 

AFTER  one  has  spent  a  fatiguing  after- 
noon pricing  whisky  flasks,  or  being  pushed 
along  avenues  of  palms  and  Australian 
pines  in  a  wheel-chair,  or  indulging  in  a  little 
steady  bridge  and  drinking,  or  some  other 
equally  arduous  pursuit,  the  smart  thing  to 
do  is  to  go  to  the  Coconut  Grove  and  partici- 
pate in  a  little  tea  and  dancing. 

The  Coconut  Grove  consists  of  a  large 
and  beautiful  grove  of  coconut  trees  sur- 
rounding a  polished  dance  floor.  All  the 
coconuts  have  been  removed  from  the  trees, 
owing  to  their  well-known  habit  of  falling 
off  unexpectedly  and  utterly  ruining  any 
one  who  may  be  lingering  beneath  them. 
Thus  the  only  nuts  in  the  grove  are  the  ones 
who  come  there  to  dance. 

55 


56  SUN  HUNTING 

The  Coconut  Grove  starts  doing  business 
at  half  past  five  every  afternoon  in  the 
bright  sunlight;  but  in  a  few  minutes  the 
tropic  night  closes  down  just  as  advertised 
in  all  books  on  the  South  Seas.  By  a  little 
after  six  o'clock  the  only  illumination  comes 
from  strings  of  red  electric  light  bulbs 
strung  through  the  palms  and  from  the  oc- 
casional flare  of  a  match  as  some  distin- 
guished social  butterfly  tries  to  find  out  how 
much  whisky  he  has  left  in  his  cane. 

Later  in  the  evening,  the  smart  thing  to 
do  is  to  go  over  to  what  is  formally  known 
as  the  Beach  Club,  but  universally  spoken 
of  as  Bradley's.  As  trains  from  the  north 
enter  the  Palm  Beach  station,  the  enormous 
bulk  of  the  Royal  Poinciana  Hotel  stretches 
out  at  the  right  of  the  train.  On  the  left  of 
the  train,  directly  opposite  the  station  and 
so  close  to  the  train  that  the  traveler  could 
toss  even  a  lightweight  biscuit  on  to  its  roof 
from  the  car  window,  is  a  long,  low,  white 
frame  building  with  a  large  revolving  ven-* 


o 


o 
O 

I 


Near  the  Flagler  estate  at  Palm  Beach. 


The  Australian  Pine  Walk  between  the  Poinciana  and  The  Breakers, 
Palm  Beach. 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  57 

tilator  in  one  end.  This  is  Bradley's,  Palm 
Beach's  oldest,  most  celebrated  and  most 
popular  charitable  institution — charitable 
because  it  assists  people  who  have  more 
money  than  they  know  what  to  do  with  to 
get  rid  of  part  of  it  in  a  quiet  and  eminently- 
respectable  way. 

Every  large  resort  in  the  world  that  ca- 
ters to  wealthy  people  has  its  gambling 
houses.  In  Europe  the  municipalities  run 
them,  recognizing  the  fact  that  all  people  of 
means  who  are  on  a  holiday  are  bound  to 
gamble.  At  America's  resorts  the  gambling 
houses  are  usually  concealed;  but  they  exist 
none  the  less;  and  usually,  because  of  the 
secrecy  that  surrounds  them,  they  are  lurk- 
ing-places for  troublesome  aggregations  of 
trimmers,  bloodsuckers  and  crooks  of  va- 
rious sorts. 

Bradley's  is  different.  It  is  run  exclu- 
sively for  the  wealthy  northern  patrons  of 
Palm  Beach;  and  the  person  whose  legal 
residence  or  place  of  business  is  located  in 


58  SUN  HUNTING 

Florida  is  supposed  to  be  barred.  Almost 
everybody  who  goes  there  can  afford  to 
lose  and  lose  heavily ;  and  a  list  of  the  names 
of  the  people  who  play  there  every  night 
would  read  like  a  list  of  America's  leading 
celebrities,  social  lights  and  millionaires. 
There  may  be  some  who  can't  afford  to  play ; 
but  if  there  are  any  such,  their  folly  in  visit- 
ing Palm  Beach  marks  them  as  persons  who 
deserve  to  be  ruined  as  expeditiously  as  pos- 
sible. 

A  crook  would  be  about  as  much  at  home 
in  Bradley's  as  an  icicle  would  be  in  the 
crater  of  Mt.  Vesuvius. 

All  things  considered,  it  is  probably  the 
only  gambling  house  in  the  United  States 
whose  closing  would  be  a  calamity  to  the 
community. 

Bradley's  is  a  club.  In  order  to  be  made 
a  member,  one  must  be  introduced  by  a  mem- 
ber. It  is  one  of  the  few  existing  clubs 
which  has  no  initiation  fees  and  no  dues; 
but  for  all  that,  the  members  usually  spend 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  59 

all  they  have  in  their  clothes  every  time  they 
go  in  for  an  evening  of  good  fellowship  and 
club  life;  so  it  isn't  as  inexpensive  as  it 
sounds. 

Anybody  in  Palm  Beach,  from  the  wheel- 
chair boys  to  the  policemen,  can  supply  the 
inquirer  with  all  the  standard  Beach  Club 
stories,  usually  starting  with  the  one  about 
the  man  who  lost  six  thousand  dollars  in 
one  evening  and  left  Palm  Beach  hurriedly 
the  next  morning.  A  few  hours  later,  one 
of  the  Bradley  brothers  was  visited  by  a 
young  woman  who  was  obviously  in  great 
distress.  Her  eyes  were  red  and  swollen 
and  she  was  sobbing  convulsively.  She  ex- 
plained that  her  husband  had  lost  six  thou- 
sand dollars  the  night  before,  that  the 
money  didn't  belong  to  him  and  that  unless 
she  could  get  the  money  back  for  him,  he 
would  have  to  go  to  prison.  So  Bradley 
gave  back  the  six  thousand  dollars  after  tell- 
ing the  young  woman  to  tell  her  husband 
never  again  to  set  foot  in  the  Beach  Club.  A 


6o  SUN  HUNTING 

few  days  afterward  the  same  man  turned  up 
in  the  Beach  Club  and  began  to  play.  Bradley 
summoned  him  to  his  office  and  asked  him 
how  he  dared  to  do  such  a  thing  after  his 
losses  had  been  returned  to  his  wife.  "What 
do  you  mean?"  asked  the  man,  "I'm  not 
married." 

"Then  you  didn't  leave  town  because  you 
were  ruined?"  asked  Bradley. 

"You  bet  I  didn't!"  said  the  man.  "I 
went  down  to  Long  Key  fishing  with  my 
business  partner,  who  came  down  here  with 


me." 


A  woman  in  an  adjoining  room  had  heard 
the  two  men  talking  before  their  departure, 
and  had  cashed  in  on  the  conversation. 

Then  there  is  the  story  about  the  wife 
who  used  to  extract  uncashed  chips  from 
her  husband's  clothes  whenever  he  played 
at  Bradley's,  and  who  cashed  them  in  for 
twenty-five  thousand  dollars  without  her 
husband  knowing  that  he  had  lost  anything. 
And  the  one  about  the  gentleman  who 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  61 

cleaned  up  seventy  thousand  dollars  in  one 
week. 

It  is  not  at  all  unusual  to  see  one  of  the  big 
steel  men  or  oil  men  placing  five  hundred 
dollars  in  chips  on  the  board  at  each  turn 
of  the  wheel,  and  dropping  fifteen  or  twenty 
thousand  dollars  in  half  an  hour. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

OF     THE     DIVERGENCES     BETWEEN     BRADLEY^     AND 

MONTE  CARLO  —  OF  THE  IDIOSYNCRASIES  OF  THE 

LITTLE    WHITE    PILL  -  OF    THE    ODDITIES    OF 

FAT    PLAYERS  -  OF    TIME-KILLING    PAS- 

TIMES —  AND    OF    THE    WISDOM    OF 

DIONYSIUS  THE   ELDER 


the  only  similarity  between  Brad- 
ley's  and  the  Monte  Carlo  Casino  is  the 
squareness  of  the  game  and  the  roundness 
of  the  roulette  wheels.  A  majority  of  the 
people  who  gamble  at  Bradley's  are  the  ex- 
treme opposite  of  the  majority  of  the  people 
who  gamble  at  Monte  Carlo;  and  in  these 
two  gambling  houses  any  observer  may  dis- 
cover an  outstanding  difference  between  the 
European's  and  the  American's  attitude 
toward  money.  For  years  Americans  have 
been  disparaged  by  Europeans  as  money- 
grubbers.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  people  of 
all  nations,  generally  speaking,  are  money- 
grubbers,  in  that  they  devote  themselves  to 
62 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  63 

earning  money  on  which  to  live.  The 
European,  however,  pursues  his  money  with 
an  unrelenting  ferocity;  and  when  he  over- 
takes it,  he  seizes  it  with  such  an  iron  grip 
that  the  head  on  each  coin  almost  bursts  into 
shrill  screams  of  agony.  The  European 
makes  money  in  order  to  save  it;  and  he 
never  lets  go  of  it  if  he  can  help  it.  The 
American  regards  money-making  as  a  fas- 
cinating game;  and  he  makes  it  in  order  to 
spend  it. 

At  Monte  Carlo  almost  every  gambler, 
out  of  the  thousands  that  play  there,  plays  a 
system.  He  uses  a  system  book,  checking 
each  turn  of  the  wheel  in  it,  and  writing 
down  column  upon  column  of  figures.  He 
devotes  hours  to  computing  his  chances  of 
winning ;  and  practically  every  system  player 
believes  implicitly  that  he  isn't  risking  his 
money,  but  that  he  has  a  sure  system  that 
will  enable  him  to  get  something  from  the 
Casino  for  nothing.  He  gambles  for  profit ; 
not  for  pleasure. 


64  SUN  HUNTING 

At  Bradley's,  nobody  plays  a  system.  All 
of  the  club-members — oil  millionaires,  steel 
millionaires,  short-haired  and  short-skirted 
debutantes,  and  fat  dowagers  half  concealed 
behind  interlacing  ropes  of  pearls  and  dia- 
monds— play  only  for  the  thrill  of  playing. 
A  person  who  used  a  system  book  would 
probably  be  regarded  as  being  either  insane 
or  drunk.  Nine-tenths  of  the  women  don't 
know  enough  about  the  game  to  play  any- 
thing except  a  number  full  on  the  nose,  or 
red  and  black.  In  roulette  a  number  can  be 
played  full  on  the  nose;  and  if  it  turns  up 
on  the  wheel,  the  player  receives  thirty-five 
for  one.  If  one  is  satisfied  with  smaller 
odds,  and  with  better  chances  of  winning, 
one  can  place  his  money  between  two  num- 
bers, or  in  the  middle  of  four  numbers,  or  on 
a  transversal  of  three  numbers,  or  on  a  dou- 
ble transversal  of  six  numbers,  or  in  various 
other  ways.  At  Monte  Carlo  the  favorite 
woman's  bet  is  the  single  and  double  trans- 
versal. At  Bradley's  the  men,  and  women 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  65 

too,  bet  almost  entirely  on  single  numbers. 
They  want  the  big  thrill  that  comes  from 
collecting  thirty-five  dollars  for  each  dollar 
that  they  put  up.  They  become  foolishly 
stubborn  about  it,  sticking  to  a  single  num- 
ber so  long  that  it  would  have  to  turn  up 
three  or  four  times  in  succession  in  order  to 
enable  them  to  break  even.  Fat  ladies  at 
Bradley's  love  to  take  a  fat  roll  of  chips  in 
one  hand  and  run  the  hand  down  a  column 
of  numbers,  allowing  the  chips  to  slip  off 
their  fingertips  and  stay  where  they  drop. 

There  are  two  gambling  rooms  in  Brad- 
ley's — the  big  octagonal  outer  room  in  which 
there  are  six  roulette  tables  and  two  French 
Hazard  tables,  and  the  small  inner  room  for 
men  only,  in  which  there  are  three  roulette 
tables  and  one  French  Hazard  table.  The 
inner  room  provides  a  retreat  for  the  men 
whose  attention  is  constantly  distracted  in 
the  outer  room  by  the  frequent  demand  on 
the  part  of  their  wives  and  daughters  for 
another  fifty  dollars. 


66  SUN  HUNTING 

By  half  past  nine  o'clock  every  night, 
Bradley's  is  so  crowded  that  one  must  al- 
most fight  his  way  from  table  to  table.  No 
matter  where  one  threw  a  brick  in  the  as- 
semblage, it  would  be  certain  to  hit  a  mil- 
lionaire and  carom  against  two  other  mil- 
lionaires before  falling  to  the  floor.  Until 
midnight  there  are  usually  more  women  than 
men  engaged  in  observing  the  idiosyncrasies 
of  the  little  ivory  ball ;  and  the  hold-up  man 
who  succeeded  in  holding  up  the  clientele 
of  the  Beach  Club  at  eleven  o'clock  at  night 
would  have  no  difficulty  at  all  in  picking  up 
at  least  ten  million  dollars'  worth  of  loot  in 
jewelry  alone.  Many  of  the  women  wear 
their  strings  of  pearls  in  double  and  triple 
loops  so  that  they  wont  trip  on  them  when 
they  walk,  and  most  of  them  seem  to  think 
that  they  may  get  rheumatism  if  they  don't 
wear  at  least  five  diamond  bracelets  on  their 
left  wrists. 

One  frequently  sees  these  ladies  rolling 
up  the  Lake  Trail  at  midnight  in  wheel- 


THE  TIME-KILLERS  67 

chairs  with  a  quarter  million  or  a  half  mil- 
lion dollars'  worth  of  jewels  sparkling  in  the 
moonlight.  They  are  merely  out  taking  the 
air,  so  that  they  can  go  back  to  the  party 
which  they  just  left  and  renew  their  activi- 
ties without  falling  asleep.  They  dance  and 
play  cards  and  slip  a  few  cocktails  and  ex- 
change light  persiflage  until  four  and  five 
and  six  o'clock  in  the  morning. 

They  grow  stronger  and  stronger  as  the 
season  grows  older,  until  toward  the  end 
they  may  be  found  going  in  bathing  in  their 
ballgowns  at  dawn  and  indulging  in  other 
tireless  activities.  If  a  tough,  hardy  Indian 
scout  or  Alpine  mountain  climber  tried  to 
follow  them  for  three  days,  he'd  drop  in  his 
tracks  with  fatigue. 

Such  is  life  among  the  time-killers  of 
Palm  Beach.  They  go  there  to  kill  time, 
and  they  are  diligent  at  it.  Old  man  Plu- 
tarch states  that  "Dionysius  the  Elder,  being 
asked  whether  he  was  at  leisure,  replied, 
'God  forbid  that  it  should  ever  befall  me/  " 


68  SUN  HUNTING 

The  Palm  Beach  time-killers  operate  on  the 
same  principle.  The  last  thing  in  the  world 
that  they  desire  is  leisure,  and  the  person 
who  argues  that  Palm  Beach  is  frequented 
by  the  leisure  class  is  suffering  from  warped 
perception.  They  have  different  ways  of 
killing  time.  Some  of  them  talk  it  to  death 
and  some  of  them  worry  it  to  death,  and 
some  of  them  smother  it  with  money.  No 
time  gets  by  them :  they  kill  it  all ;  and  how- 
ever they  choose  to  do  it,  they're  the  hard- 
est working  people  in  the  world. 


BOOK   TWO 

THE  TIN-CANNERS 


CHAPTER  I 

OP  JANUARY  IN  THE  NORTH OF  THE   WINTER  PAS- 
TIMES   OF    MR.    AND    MRS.     CHARLES    WALNUT 

AND  OF  A   PENETRATING   CHILL 

SCENE  I  of  this  drama  of  American  man- 
ners is  laid  in  the  small  and  more  or  less 
flourishing  town  of  East  Rockpile  in  the 
northern  state  of  Massachusetts,  Illinois, 
Maine,  Indiana,  Pennsylvania,  New  Jersey, 
Vermont,  Ohio  or  Connecticut.  Or  Rhode 
Island  or  Michigan.  Or  New  Hampshire  or 
New  York. 

The  month  is  January  and  there  are  three 
feet  of  snow  on  the  ground.  The  tempera- 
ture is  so  low  that  the  mercury  has  shriveled 
in  the  thermometer  bulb  until  it  looks  like  a 
small  silver  cherry  in  a  cocktail.  The  feet 
of  passers-by  make  the  same  sort  of  squeak 
in  the  frozen  snow  that  a  mouse  makes 
when  it  unexpectedly  falls  six  feet  behind  a 
bedroom  wall  at  two  o'clock  in  the  morning. 

71 


72  SUN  HUNTING 

Mrs.  Charles  Walnut,  wife  of  East 
Rockpile's  popular  contractor  and  builder, 
is  seated  before  a  roaring  open  fire  in  the 
parlor  of  the  Walnut  home  reading  a  mail- 
order catalogue.  Directly  behind  her  chair 
an  oil  stove  emanates  heat-waves  and  an 
oil-stove  odor.  In  spite  of  this  Mrs.  Wal- 
nut shivers  perceptibly  from  time  to  time  and 
hunches  herself  more  firmly  into  the  woolen 
shawl  that  is  wrapped  around  her  shoulders. 
She  is  studying  the  portion  of  the  catalogue 
devoted  to  Gardening  Tools. 

There  is  a  loud  thumping  and  kicking 
outside.  The  front  door  opens  and  closes 
with  a  bang,  and  a  moment  later  Mr.  Wal- 
nut enters  the  room  chafing  his  ears  briskly. 
"My  gorry,  it's  cold!"  he  observed,  moving 
his  feet  up  and  down  in  a  gingerly  manner. 

"Take  off  your  overshoes,  Charles,  and 
don't  track  snow  all  over  the  house,"  replies 
Mrs.  Walnut.  "What  made  you  so  late? 
Did  you  stop  at  the  drug  store?  Wasn't 
there  any  mail?  I  believe  that  furnace  has 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  73 

gone  out  or  something,  Charles,  and  you'd 
better  go  down  and  see  if  you  can't  do  some- 
thing. I  had  to  light  the  oil  stove  to  keep 
my  back  from  freezing." 

'That  furnace  is  all  right,"  declares  Mr. 
Walnut,  sniffling  loudly  and  unbuckling  his 
overshoes.  "  Taint  any  use  trying  to  heat 
anything  in  this  weather.  There  wasn't 
anybody  at  the  drug  store  on  account  of  it 
being  so  cold.  The  train  was  late  on  account 
of  froze  switches  or  something.  There 
wasn't  any  mail  except  three  seed  cata- 
logues. My  gorry,  Emma,  one  of  those 
catalogues  has  got  a  picture  of  a  tomato 
eight  inches  through.  The  name  of  it's  the 
Great  Ruby.  We  want  to  get  a  lot  of  those 
Great  Rubies  in  May,  Emma." 

"Yes,"  says  Mrs.  Walnut  despondently, 
"and  when  we  get  around  to  picking  'em, 
they'll  be  about  the  size  of  crab  apples,  and 
we'll  feel  like  Great  Rubes." 

"It's  the  cold  weather  that  makes  you  feel 
that  way,  Emma,"  says  Mr.  Walnut  compas- 


74  SUN  HUNTING 

sionately.  "In  April,  when  the  grass  begins 
to  get  green  and  the  robins  begin  to  sing  at 
sun-up,  you'll  feel  better." 

"Maybe  so,  Charles,"  says  Mrs.  Walnut, 
"but  that's  three  months  away.  Sometimes 
I  wish  I  could  go  to  sleep  like  a  bear  in  De- 
cember and  sleep  until  April.  Go  down  and 
fix  the  furnace  and  then  come  to  bed.  It's 
the  only  warm  place  in  the  house." 

Mr.  Walnut  leaves  the  room  obediently, 
clumps  noisily  down  the  cellar  stairs,  and  is 
soon  heard  operating  on  the  furnace  and  de- 
pleting his  coal  supply.  Mrs.  Walnut  listens 
with  a  quick  succession  of  shivers  to  the 
shrill  squeaking  of  sleigh-runners  on  the 
snow.  The  fire-whistle  sounds  three 
hoarse,  bronchial  notes,  marking  the  arrival 
of  nine  o'clock  and  of  a  meaningless  some- 
thing known  as  curfew.  Mrs.  Walnut  picks 
up  the  oil  stove,  clutches  her  shawl  tightly 
against  her  chest,  goes  out  into  the  tomb- 
like  hall,  and  is  heard  mounting  the  front 
stairs  stiffly. 


CHAPTER  II 

OF  A  PRONOUNCED  CHANGE  OF  SCENE — OF  A  DARING 

GAME  OF  CHANCE  AMID  TROPICAL  SCENTS AND 

OF   THE   GLOATING   OF    CHARLES   WALNUT 
AND  HERMAN   BLISTER 

SCENE  II  of  this  emotional  cross-section 
of  national  life  is  laid  on  the  outskirts  of  the 
thriving  town  of  Porgy  Inlet,  Florida.  One 
year  has  elapsed  between  Scenes  I  and  II. 
The  month  is  January.  A  soft  breeze  rustles 
the  palm-fronds  and  sets  the  waters  of  the 
near-by  inlet  to  lapping  soothingly  against 
the  shore.  Electric  lights  are  hung  at  inter- 
vals between  the  palms  and  the  moss-hung 
live  oaks ;  and  beneath  them  are  parked  auto- 
mobiles of  all  sizes  and  shapes.  Some  of  the 
automobiles  are  bloated  and  swollen  out  of 
all  semblance  to  an  automobile ;  while  others 
are  obviously  automobiles,  but  have  spouted 
great  tent-like  wens  at  the  side  or  rear.  The 
license  plates  on  these  automobiles  show  that 

75 


76  SUN  HUNTING 

they  come  all  the  way  from  Maine,  from 
Ohio,  from  Dakota,  from  Massachusetts. 
Indiana  is  heavily  represented,  as  are  Michi- 
gan and  Illinois,  to  say  nothing  of  Minne- 
sota, Rhode  Island,  New  Jersey,  New  York, 
Oregon,  Connecticut,  Washington,  Vermont 
and  a  number  of  other  states. 

Around  a  folding  camp-table  beneath  one 
of  the  largest  and  mossiest  live  oaks  sit  Mr. 
and  Mrs.  Charles  Walnut  of  East  Rockpile 
and  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Herman  Blister  of  Tack- 
hammer,  Michigan.  Mr.  Walnut,  as  has 
been  stated,  is  a  contractor  and  builder.  Mr. 
Blister's  business  or  calling  is  that  of  corn- 
farmer.  The  Walnuts  and  the  Blisters  are 
in  the  act  of  finishing  up  an  exciting  game 
of  hearts.  "My  gorry,"  declares  Mr.  Wal- 
nut as  he  slaps  down  his  last  card  with  great 
violence  on  Mr.  Blister's  lead,  "my  gorry,  I 
certainly  thought  I  was  going  to  get  stuck 
with  that  queen  of  spades!"  He  figures 
hastily  on  the  back  of  an  envelope.  "You 
folks  owe  us  seven  cents,"  he  announces 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  77 

eventually.  Mr.  Blister  sighs  deeply,  re- 
moves a  shiny  black  wallet  from  his  trou- 
sers pocket  and  wrenches  seven  cents  from 
it  reluctantly. 

Mrs.  Walnut  waves  a  wisp  of  Spanish 
moss  reprovingly  at  a  mosquito  that  is 
dancing  gaily  in  front  of  her  nose.  "Now, 
Charles,"  says  she  dreamily,  "if  you're  going 
up  the  inlet  after  yellowtails  at  sun-up 
to-morrow,  we've  got  to  be  getting  to  bed. 
You  know  the  last  time  you  sat  up  late,  it 
made  you  nervous  and  you  lost  forty  cents 
pitching  horseshoes." 

From  the  water's  edge  sounds  the  tinkle 
of  a  mandolin;  a  distant  quartet  toys  suc- 
cessfully with  Mandy  Lee  in  spite  of  the 
fact  that  the  tenor  is  decidedly  sour ;  a  baby 
in  a  near-by  automobile  awakes  to  the  woes 
of  its  new  life  with  a  series  of  shrill  and 
wheezy  bleats ;  the  balmy  air  is  rich  with  the 
mingled  scent  of  jasmine,  orange  peel,  salt 
water  and  talcum  powder. 

"All   right,   Emma,"   says   Mr.   Walnut, 


78  SUN  HUNTING 

pocketing  his  seven  cents  and  stretching  his 
arms  comfortably.  "I  think  mebbe  if  I  get 
a  good  sleep,  I  might  catch  me  enough  red 
snappers  for  a  mess." 

Mrs.  Walnut  precedes  him  into  the  khaki 
tent  which  is  attached  to  the  side  of  their 
small  automobile  like  a  giant  fungus,  and  as 
Mr.  Walnut  raises  the  flap  to  follow  her, 
he  looks  back  at  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Blister  and 
bursts  into  hoarse  laughter.  "Say,  Herm !" 
he  bawls  pleasantly.  Mr.  Blister  halts  ex- 
pectantly. "Back  home,"  says  Mr.  Walnut, 
jerking  his  head  over  his  left  shoulder, 
"back  home  they're  fixing  the  furnace  and 
hoping  the  pipes  won't  freeze." 

"Haw,  haw,  haw!"  replies  Mr.  Blister 
with  evident  enjoyment. 

"My  gorry!"  ejaculates  Mr.  Walnut  by 
way  of  expressing  combined  disgust  for  and 
despair  of  the  human  race.  And  the  tent- 
flap  falls  behind  him  as  he  joins  Mrs.  Wal- 
nut. 


CHAPTER  III 

OP   MIGRANTS  AND  MIGRATIONS— OF  THE   TRUE  SUN- 
HUNTER    AND    HIS    DESIRES AND    OF    HIS    UNI- 
FORM,    AND     HIS     FLUENT     ASSORTMENT 
OF  EQUIPMENT 

THE  manner  in  which  modern  migrations 
are  stimulated  is  pretty  much  the  same  all 
over  the  world.  A  resident  of  Poland,  hav- 
ing no  money  and  no  job,  borrows  enough 
money  from  a  relative  in  America  to  make 
the  trip.  Having  made  it,  he  writes  back 
pityingly  to  his  friends  in  Poland.  "Why," 
he  asks  in  his  letter,  "should  you  stay  in 
Poland?  It  is  a  rotten  place.  Borrow  some 
money  and  come  over  here  quick.  The 
place  is  full  of  rich  suckers  who  will  buy 
anything  you  show  them.  All  of  the 
Americans  have  got  money.  Come  quickly 
before  somebody  gets  all  of  it  away  from 
them."  As  soon  as  it  becomes  known  that 
America  can  offer  advantages  which 

79 


80  SUN  HUNTING 

Europe  doesn't  possess,  the  European  is 
filled  with  a  passionate  desire  to  capture  a 
few  of  them.  Philosophers  who  have  made 
a  careful  study  of  human  motives  and  emo- 
tions have  embalmed  the  philosophy  of  mi- 
grations in  a  few  phrases,  such  as  "distance 
lends  enchantment,"  and  "they  all  look  good 
when  they're  far  away."  These  phrases 
are  true ;  but  the  thing  that  lends  the  great- 
est amount  of  enchantment  to  a  distant 
piece  of  real-estate  is  a  letter  from  Cousin 
Walt  or  Friend  Herbert  saying,  "You 
ought  to  see  the  fish  we  catch  down  here. 
A  full  course  dinner  only  costs  seventy-five 
cents.  Don't  miss  this  next  year." 

The  northern  states,  in  the  past  few 
years,  have  developed  a  new  type  of  migrant. 
Instead  of  being  hot  on  the  trail  of  any  sort 
of  coin,  currency  or  legal  tender,  as  is  the 
modern  European  immigrant,  and  instead 
of  being  in  search  of  political  or  religious 
freedom,  as  were  many  European  immi- 
grants during  the  past  century,  the  modern 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  81 

migrant  is  after  warm  weather  during  the 
winter  months.  He  is  a  sun-hunter.  He  is 
sick  of  four  months  of  snow  and  ice.  He  is 
heartily  tired  of  cold  feet,  numb  ears,  red 
flannel  underwear,  rheumatism,  stiff  necks, 
coal  bills,  coughs,  colds,  influenza,  draughts, 
mittens,  ear-tabs,  snow  shovels,  shaking 
down  the  furnace,  carrying  out  ashes,  and 
falling  down  on  an  icy  sidewalk  and  sprain- 
ing his  back.  It  gives  him  a  prolonged  pain 
to  wear  his  overshoes  and  a  muffler  and  to 
have  to  thaw  out  the  radiator  of  his  automo- 
bile every  two  or  three  days.  The  bane  of 
his  existence  is  sitting  around  the  house  for 
four  months  waiting  for  April  to  come 
along  and  unstiffen  his  joints.  He  wants 
sun  and  lots  of  it.  If  he  must  spend  four 
months  doing  nothing,  he  prefers  to  spend 
it  amid  the  Spanish  moss  and  the  palm 
trees,  harkening  dreamily  to  the  cheerful 
twittering  of  the  dicky-birds  and  to  the 
stirring  thuds  of  coconuts,  oranges  and  grape- 
fruit as  they  fall  heavily  to  the  ground. 


82  SUN  HUNTING 

In  the  big  hotels  in  Palm  Beach,  Miami, 
Ormond,  Daytona,  St.  Augustine  and  other 
Florida  resorts  are  the  time-killers,  with 
their  jewel-lariats  and  their  acres  of  white 
trousers:  with  their  flask-trimmed  tea- 
dances  and  their  hard-boiled  social  aspira- 
tions and  their  refined  gambling  houses, 
and  their  trick  whisky-canes.  The  sun,  to 
the  time-killers,  is  not  of  the  utmost  impor- 
tance. If  they  were  unable  to  change  their 
clothes  several  times  a  day  they  would  feel 
ill-at-ease ;  if  they  were  unable  to  be  charged 
a  little  matter  of  forty  dollars  a  day  for  a 
double  room  and  bath,  they  would  feel  that 
they  were  being  slighted  in  some  way;  if 
they  couldn't  have  the  knowledge  that  they 
were  inhaling  the  same  air  which  was  being 
inhaled  by  the  leading  millionaires  and  so- 
ciety pets,  they  would  feel  cheated. 

Not  so  the  sun-hunter.  The  sun-hunter 
knows  the  value  of  a  dollar.  He  usually 
knows  the  value  of  a  nickel,  also.  It  is  said 
that  before  he  relinquishes  his  hold  on  a 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  83 

twenty-five-cent  piece,  he  gives  it  a  fare- 
well squeeze  of  such  violence  that  the  eagle 
on  it  frequently  emits  a  strangled  squawk  of 
anguish.  This  statement,  I  believe,  is  a  gross 
exaggeration.  The  fact  remains,  however, 
that  one  never  finds  the  sun-hunter  throw- 
ing his  money  around  in  the  loose,  spasmodic 
manner  which  always  characterizes  the 
genuine  time-killer.  And  the  sun-hunter 
wants  just  two  things:  sun  and  air.  He 
knows  nothing  about  Charley  Schwab  or 
Harry  Payne  Whitney  or  the  Stotesburys, 
and  he  would  take  no  interest  whatever  in 
them  unless  they  got  between  him  and  the 
sun. 

He  might  entertain  the  notion  of  running 
over  to  Miami  Beach  to  view  the  residence 
of  Bob  Hassler,  who  invented  a  Ford  shock- 
absorber;  but  other  plutocrats  and  social 
luminaries  leave  him  cold. 

Clothes  mean  nothing  in  his  life.  The 
male  sun-hunter  is  usually  garbed  in  dark 
trousers  which  hang  loosely  on  his  legs  like 


84  SUN  HUNTING 

the  trousers  always  inflicted  on  sculptured 
statesmen  by  sculptors  of  the  Horace  Gree- 
ley  period.  He  may  or  he  may  not  wear  a 
coat,  depending  entirely  on  his  whim  of  the 
moment;  but  he  almost  invariably  affects 
the  old-fashioned  gallus,  or  suspender.  He 
will  be  found  in  this  garb  on  Sunday  morn- 
ing, when  fishing  for  yellowtails  on  the  edge 
of  a  creek  with  a  bamboo  pole;  he  will  be 
found  in  it  on  Wednesday  afternoon,  when 
visiting  the  movies ;  and  he  will  be  found  in 
it  on  Friday  evening  when  engaged  in  an 
exciting  game  of  euchre  with  a  pair  of 
brother  and  sister  sun-hunters.  He  may 
change  it,  but  there  are  few  who  are  aware 
of  it  if  he  does.  It  is  the  sun-hunter's  uni- 
form. 

The  sun-hunters  are  not  recruited  from 
any  one  class  of  citizens.  The  natives  of  Flor- 
ida, with  their  unflagging  determination  to 
place  everything  in  the  most  favorable  light, 
tell  you  that  they  are  bankers,  merchants, 
doctors,  lawyers  and  what-not.  They'd 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  85 

have  you  think  that  most  of  them  are  bank- 
ers. As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  are  some 
bankers  among  them — and  some  burglars, 
too.  The  bulk  of  them  are  farmers;  for  a 
farmer  can,  if  he  wishes,  arrange  matters 
so  that  he  has  little  or  nothing  to  do  during 
the  winter  months.  Next  to  them  come 
contractors,  builders  and  carpenters.  The 
sun-hunters  are  the  people  who  can  get 
away  from  home  with  the  least  amount  of 
trouble;  and  among  them  one  finds  retired 
business  men  of  all  sorts,  dairymen,  doctors, 
bankers,  lawyers  and  similar  folk. 

Such  is  the  modern  American  migrant, 
and  Florida  is  the  goal  of  his  migration.  As 
soon  as  the  first  snow  begins  to  fall  in  the 
North,  or  when  the  earth  has  tightened  up 
under  a  black  frost,  the  sun-hunters  prepare 
for  their  flight  to  the  South.  Great  num- 
bers of  them  travel  by  automobile ;  and  their 
automobiles  are  completely  stocked  with 
folding  chairs,  collapsible  beds,  accordeon- 
mattresses,  knock-down  tents,  come-apart 


86  SUN  HUNTING 

stoves,  telescopic  dishwashers  and  a  score 
of  dishpans,  tables,  dinner-sets,  tin  cups, 
water-buckets  and  toilet  articles  that  fold 
up  into  one  another  and  look  like  a  bushel  of 
scrap-tin.  In  addition  to  this,  each  automo- 
bile carries  a  large  assortment  of  canned 
goods.  There  are  canned  goods  under  the 
seats,  slung  against  the  top,  packed  along 
tfie  sides,  tucked  behind  cushions  and  stacked 
along  the  floor.  Some  of  the  automobiles 
are  so  well  stocked  with  canned  things  that 
they  could  make  a  dash  for  the  Pole.  And 
as  one  passes  some  of  them  on  the  road,  they 
sound  as  though  their  owners  were  carrying 
a  reserve  supply  of  canned  goods  under  the 
hood — loose. 


CHAPTER  IV 

OF  THE  TIN-CAN  TOURISTS  OF  THE  WORLD— OF   IM- 
MIGRANTS    AND    OTHER     UNSUPERVISED     VISITORS, 
NATIONAL  AND  LOCAL— OF  CHEAP  SKATES — AND 
OF   THE   REASON    WHY   TIN-CANNERS    DO    NOT 
ABOUND    IN    PALM    BEACH 

IT  is  due  to  the  heavy  weight  of  cans  car- 
ried by  these  automobiles  that  the  true, 
stamped-in-the-can  sun-hunter  is  known  to 
himself,  to  his  friends  and  to  his  enemies  as 
a  tin-can  tourist.  He  lives  in  more  or  less 
permanent  settlements  known  as  tin-can 
towns ;  and  his  interests  are  safeguarded  by 
a  flourishing  organization  rejoicing  in  the 
impressive  title  of  Tin-Can  Tourists  of  the 
World. 

The  badge  of  the  Tin-Can  Tourists  of  the 
World  is  a  small  white  celluloid  button  with 
the  letters  T  C  T  tastefully  disposed  on  it 
in  dark  blue.  The  insignia  of  the  order 
is  a  small  soup-can  mounted  on  the  radiator 

87 


88  SUN  HUNTING 

of  the  member's  automobile.  There  is  also 
a  password  which  the  members  bawl  at  one 
another  when  they  pass  on  the  road ;  but  this 
is  one  of  the  secrets  of  the  fraternity  that 
should  not  be  profaned  by  publication. 

The  Tin-Canners  organized  in  1919  at 
the  Tampa  Tin-Can  Town  and  have  held 
conventions  there  ever  since.  The  present 
membership  of  the  order  is  estimated  by 
some  of  the  most  important  officials  or 
Khans  of  the  Tin-Can  Tourists  to  be  in  ex- 
cess of  thirty  thousand. 

Practically  every  Florida  town  and  city, 
large  and  small,  located  inland  or  on  the 
gulf  or  on  the  ocean,  provides  a  tin-can  town 
or  a  tin-can  village  for  the  tin-can  tourists. 
Occasionally  these  towns  are  free  and  pro- 
vide not  only  all  the  comforts  of  home,  but 
comforts  that  home  never  possessed  for 
most  of  the  tin-canners.  The  largest  and 
most  celebrated  tin-can  town  is  in  De  Soto 
Park,  East  Tampa,  on  the  shore  of  Tampa 
•Bay.  Hundreds  of  automobiles  are  lined 


ic  apotheosis  of  tin-can  comfort. 


-x- '          t  Jk  «•  • 

&*•   '  •  .  y.' 

m^BK^H^HH 


A  tin-can  camp  between  Palm  Beach  and  Miami. 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  89 

up  side  by  side  throughout  the  winter  in  De 
Soto  Park.  The  camp,  which  is  carefully 
regulated  and  policed  by  the  municipal 
authorities,  is  free.  A  trolley  line  connects 
it  with  the  business  section  of  Tampa.  In 
the  center  of  the  camp  is  a  pavilion  where 
entertainments  are  given.  The  camp  has 
electric  lights,  running  water,  city  sewerage, 
shower  baths  and  an  enormous  hot-water 
tank.  Tourists  are  permitted  to  send  their 
children  to  the  excellent  schools  on  payment 
of  fifty  cents  a  week — which  is  too  little. 

Oddly  enough,  fifty  cents  a  week,  or 
twenty-five  dollars  a  year,  is  the  amount 
that  naturalization  experts  want  to  charge 
aliens  for  their  schooling,  but  that  Congress 
considers  too  high.  It's  not  enough  for 
American  tin-canners ;  but  it's  too  much  for 
aliens.  How  does  Congress  get  that  way? 

About  the  only  things  that  aren't  fur- 
nished for  the  tin-canners  are  free  tele- 
phones, a  free  morning  paper  and  free  butler 
and  valet  service. 


90  SUN  HUNTING 

During  the  1920-1921  season  there  were 
great  numbers  of  free  tin-can  camps 
throughout  Florida;  but  Florida  towns 
found,  as  the  United  States  itself  is  begin- 
ning to  find,  that  an  open-handed  and  un- 
supervised  welcome  to  any  person  who  can 
scratch  up  enough  money  to  take  advantage 
of  the  welcome  will  bring  nothing  but  annoy- 
ances, losses  and  misery  in  its  train.  The 
Tampa  camp  was  a  success  because  it  was 
very  carefully  regulated  and  policed.  Many 
of  the  other  free  camps,  however,  suddenly 
woke  up  to  the  truth  of  the  old  adage  that 
people  never  appreciate  the  things  that  they 
get  for  nothing.  This  is,  of  course,  the  old 
problem  of  immigration  reduced  to  a  per- 
sonal basis. 

The  United  States  talks  for  a  century 
about  the  necessity  of  restricting  immigra- 
tion and  forcing  aliens  to  pay  for  the  priv- 
ilege of  enjoying  America's  benefits,  but  in 
that  hundred  years,  she  does  next  to  nothing. 
Florida  towns,  confronted  with  a  mild  edi- 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  91 

tion  of  the  same  problem,  take  action  over- 
night. 

What  happened  was  this — and  the  same 
thing  to  a  far  greater  degree  and  with  far 
more  evil  and  wide-spread  results,  is  hap- 
pening to  the  United  States  and  will  keep  on 
happening  until  immigration  is  rigidly  re- 
stricted : 

Word  began  to  go  forth  in  the  northern 
states  that  free  camping-grounds  were  to 
be  had  in  Florida  towns  and  cities;  that  if 
one  bought  a  second-hand  flivver  at  the  be- 
ginning of  winter  and  beat  his  way  to  these 
camps,  he  could  live  more  cheaply  than  he 
could  live  in  the  North,  could  afford  to 
accept  lower  pay  for  his  services  than  could 
the  Florida  natives,  and  could  go  back  North 
in  the  spring  with  money  in  his  pocket  and 
sell  his  flivver  for  what  he  paid  for  it. 
These  are  almost  exactly  the  same  reasons 
that  brought  a  million  immigrants  a  year 
to  America  from  Eastern  and  Southern 
Europe  before  the  war. 


92  SUN  HUNTING 

Florida  has  made  it  plain  that  she  wants 
no  more  of  these  seasonal  laborers  who  can't 
make  a  satisfactory  living  in  their  own  com- 
munities. Most  of  them  are  so  hard-boiled 
that  a  diamond-pointed  drill  is  needed  to 
penetrate  their  shells ;  and  most  of  them  have 
as  much  regard  for  neatness,  cleanliness  and 
the  rights  of  others  as  a  Berkshire  hog  has 
for  a  potato-peel.  Tin-can  towns  have  begun 
to  charge  various  prices  for  the  privilege  of 
staying  in  them — prices  ranging  from 
twenty-five  cents  a  night  to  seventy-five 
cents  a  night,  or  from  four  dollars  to  ten 
dollars  a  month.  Even  the  free  towns  won't 
admit  residents  who  wish  to  go  to  work 
each  day.  They've  got  to  be  tourists,  or 
devote  themselves  to  taking  the  air.  As  a  re- 
sult the  seasonal  laborers  who  went  to  Flor- 
ida for  the  1921-1922  season  were  taking 
themselves  homeward  early  in  1922  and  hurl- 
ing many  a  deep,  guttural,  rough-neck  curse 
at  the  state  of  Florida  as  they  went.  America 
would  get  very  rapid  and  satisfactory  action 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  93 

on  her  immigration  problem  if  her  citizens 
could  be  brought  in  personal  contact  with 
its  rottenness. 

These  automobile  hoboes  are  about  as  wel- 
come in  Florida  as  a  rattlesnake  at  a  straw- 
berry festival.  The  Florida  newspapers, 
usually  very  slow  indeed  to  find  any  flaws 
in  anybody  or  anything  that  has  secured  a 
foothold  in  the  state,  emit  poignant  shrieks 
of  rage  at  the  very  thought  of  them.  Early 
in  1922  a  North  Carolina  paper,  with  the 
smugness  which  characterizes  the  utterances 
of  a  resort  newspaper  when  it  thinks  it  is 
administering  a  painful  black  eye  to  another 
resort,  stepped  forward  with  a  tale  to  the 
effect  that  1922  was  seeing  a  great  exodus 
from  Florida  of  broke,  hungry  and  disheart- 
ened tourists.  Instantly  the  Florida  papers 
threw  their  palpitating  typewriters  into  the 
breach.  'The  only  Florida  tourists  beating 
it  back  to  the  North,"  declared  the  Tampa 
Tribune  scornfully,  "are  the  cut-rate,  fly- 
by-night  cheap-skates  who  have  been  com- 


94  SUN  HUNTING 

ing  to  the  state  and  preying  off  the  public 
for  the  past  many  years.  .  .  .  The  state 
has  enough  of  its  own  honest  labor  to  take 
care  of  without  opening  its  doors  to  the 
floater  who  is  here  to  take  the  bread  out  of 
his  brother's  mouth  for  less  than  the  honest 
price.  This  winter  Florida  is  taking  care  of 
its  own  out-of-work  men  and  women.  The 
riff-raff,  the  confidence  men,  the  fakir,  the 
wage  cutter  and  the  public  mendicant  all  get 
the  cold  shoulder  in  Florida." 

The  true  sun-hunter  and  the  tin-can  tour- 
ist in  good  and  accepted  standing  are  re- 
ceived in  most  parts  of  the  state  with  the 
same  quiet  welcome  that  would  greet  the 
arrival  of  a  new  citrus  fruit.  The  big  re- 
sorts like  Palm  Beach  and  Miami  Beach 
don't  welcome  the  tin-canners ;  but  those  re- 
sorts don't  welcome  any  one  who  isn't  able 
to  spend  at  least  fifty  dollars  a  day  on  the 
merest  essentials.  And  there  are  a  number 
of  young  men  employed  by  the  leading  Palm 
Beach  hostelries  who  have  nothing  but  un- 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  95 

utterable  contempt  for  the  person  who 
doesn't  spend  one  hundred  dollars  a  day 
while  he  is  at  Palm  Beach. 

So  far  as  I  know,  tin-canners  have  never 
attempted  to  wield  their  can-openers  at 
Palm  Beach  or  Miami  Beach ;  and  it  is  highly 
probable  that  the  regular  Palm  Beach  set 
would  give  the  tin-canners  even  more  of  a 
pain  than  the  tin-canners  would  give  the 
Palm  Beach  set.  One  can  imagine  the 
anguish  on  both  sides  if  Mrs.  J.  Vander- 
plank  Fritter  of  Park  Avenue  and  a  party 
of  her  prominent  friends,  should,  after  going 
in  bathing  in  full  evening  dress,  at  one  A. 
MV  emerge  in  a  still-potted  state  and  run 
smack  into  a  flivver  loaded  with  that  well- 
known  tin-canner,  Herman  Blister,  of  Tack- 
hammer,  Michigan,  and  his  wife,  sister, 
daughter  and  maiden  aunt.  The  Fritter 
party  might  feel  that  its  entire  evening  had 
been  spoiled;  but  the  Blister  family  would 
probably  feel  that  a  sinister  cloud  had  de- 
scended on  their  entire  season. 


CHAPTER  V 

OF      PORTABLE      BUNGALOWS OF      THE      RHEUMATIC 

DAIRYMAN OF     THE     LITTLE     OLE     TRUCK OF 

SIMPLE  PLEASURES  AND  LOW  EXPENDITURES 

THE  tin-canner  spends,  for  his  winter  of 
travel,  about  the  same  amount  of  money  that 
a  seasoned  Palm  Beach  mixer  frequently 
spends  in  a  couple  of  days.  This  isn't  ex- 
aggeration, either. 

On  the  road  between  Miami  and  Palm 
Beach  I  encountered  a  commodious  portable 
bungalow  lumbering  noisily  along  in  the 
general  direction  of  Palm  Beach  at  the  rate 
of  about  fifteen  miles  an  hour.  It  filled  the 
entire  road,  which  was  nine  feet  wide  at 
that  point.  There  are  many  stretches  of 
fine  macadamized  road  in  Florida  which 
are  exactly  nine  feet  wide,  so  that  when  two 
machines  pass  each  other,  one  or  both  of 
them  has  to  take  to  the  ditch.  The  reason 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  97 

for  such  peculiar  road-building  is  supposed 
to  be  due  to  the  fact  that  the  road-engineers 
took  a  look  at  the  surrounding  country, 
decided  that  nobody  would  ever  be  willing 
to  live  in  it,  and  figured  that  all  traffic  along 
the  road  would  run  in  only  one  direction — 
north.  They  were  mistaken,  as  people  usually 
are  about  the  development  of  Florida. 

At  any  rate,  this  portable  bungalow  filled 
the  road,  and  it  continued  to  fill  the  road 
until  it  found  a  good  hard  place  beside  the 
road  that  would  permit  it  to  get  out  of  the 
way  without  tearing  itself  to  pieces.  It  had 
a  thermometer  hanging  beside  its  back  door 
in  an  attractive  manner,  and  three  neigh- 
borly-looking people  were  sitting  placidly  on 
its  glassed-in  front  porch.  Across  the  base 
of  the  front  porch,  in  large  gold  letters,  was 
painted  the  owners'  address,  Bellevue,  Ohio, 
from  which  fact  one  might  suspect  that  the 
owners  were  not  persons  who  were  striving 
to  hide  their  lights  beneath  a  bushel,  or  who 
would  shrink  timidly  from  publicity. 


98  SUN  HUNTING 

When  questioned,  the  suspicion  became  a 
certainty.  The  owners  of  the  portable 
bungalow  proved  to  be  typical  tin-can  tour- 
ists, equally  ready  to  share  with  you  their 
last  tin  of  Norwegian  sardines  or  Chicago 
baked  beans  in  the  Boston  manner,  or  to 
furnish  you  with  concise  and  intimate  infor- 
mation concerning  their  own  or  their  neigh- 
bors' business  and  family  affairs  from  the 
panic  of  1907  down  to  the  present  day. 

The  owner  of  the  portable  bungalow  was 
a  dairyman  near  Sandusky,  Ohio,  who  had 
grown  tired  of  developing  rheumatism,  chil- 
blains and  a  grouch  during  the  long  winter 
months,  and  had  decided  three  years  before 
to  spend  the  winter  in  Florida.  He  had 
enjoyed  his  first  winter  so  much  that  he  had 
persuaded  a  couple  of  friends  to  make  the 
trip  with  him  during  the  second  winter ;  and 
this  winter  there  were  two  other  couples  in 
his  party.  The  other  four  people  traveled 
ahead  in  a  little  sedan ;  while  he  and  his  wife 
and  his  eighteen-year-old  son  pounded  along 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  99 

behind  in  the  ole  truck.  "Yessir,  this  house 
here  is  nothing  but  our  ole  delivery  truck 
with  a  camping  top  put  on  it,  and  she  cer- 
tainly is  the  greatest  ole  truck  you  ever 
saw!  Why,  my  gracious,  she'll  just  go 
through  anything,  this  ole  truck  will.  Why, 
coming  through  the  Everglades  this  ole 
truck  ran  into  ..." 

That  is  one  of  the  hall-marks  of  the  si- 
mon-pure tin-can  tourist.  No  matter  how 
battered  and  dilapidated  his  automobile  may 
be,  it  has  qualities  which  place  it  above  all 
other  cars — even  above  other  and  newer 
cars  of  the  same  make.  It  can  extricate  it- 
self from  thicker  mud  and  from  deeper  sand 
than  other  automobiles.  Its  feats  of  endur- 
ance are  super-automotive.  They  verge — 
to  hear  the  tin-canner  tell  it — on  the  mi- 
raculous. After  the  tin-canner  has  dwelt  for 
some  time  on  the  almost-human  intelligence 
of  the  little  ole  car,  one  thinks  of  it  as  stand- 
ing up  on  its  hind  wheels  and  honking  with 
delight  when  its  master  says  a  kind  word  to  it. 


ioo  SUN  HUNTING 

The  dairyman's  portable  bungalow,  which 
would  slough  its  skin  with  the  advent  of 
spring  and  return  to  its  less  romantic  duties 
of  trucking  milk,  contained  a  portable  stove, 
countless  canned  things,  a  fully  equipped 
sink  and  kitchen  cabinet,  three  hammocks, 
bedding  for  seven  people,  and  a  phonograph, 
to  say  nothing  of  numerous  odds  and  ends 
like  chairs,  dishes,  pans,  suit-cases  and 
what-not. 

In  the  party  that  used  this  portable 
bungalow  as  a  base  there  were,  as  I  have 
said,  seven  people.  The  seven  of  them  had 
started  from  near  Sandusky  on  the  twenty- 
second  of  November,  worked  down  to  the 
west  coast  of  Florida,  lingering  at  the  larger 
and  better  resorts,  crossed  over  to  the  east 
coast  and  were  slowly  working  back  up 
through  Palm  Beach  and  Ormond.  I  met 
them  on  the  eighth  of  February,  so  that  they 
had  been  on  the  road  for  two  months  and  a 
half.  The  expenses  were  borne  equally  by 
all  of  the  travelers,  except  the  dairyman's 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  101 

son,  who  worked  out  his  keep  by  doing  the 
dirty  work  around  the  cars.  Each  of  the 
other  six  chipped  five  dollars  apiece  into  a 
general  pool  as  money  was  needed.  In  the 
two  and  one-half  months  a  grand  total  of 
five  hundred  and  ten  dollars  had  been 
chipped  in;  and  this  sum  covered  the  total 
expenditures  of  the  trip — gasoline  for  both 
automobiles;  inner  tubes,  tires  and  repairs 
for  both  automobiles;  street-car  fares  when 
needed;  food  for  seven  people;  and  movies 
whenever  the  spirit  and  the  movies  moved 
together.  This  meant  an  average  of  sev- 
enty-three dollars  apiece  for  two  and  one- 
half  months'  travel  in  the  sunny  South,  or 
almost  exactly  a  dollar  a  day  apiece.  Such 
an  expenditure  contrasts  startlingly  with 
expenditures  in  the  big  resorts,  where  one 
week's  expense  for  a  man  and  his  wife  may 
easily  cause  a  thousand-dollar  bill  to  de- 
generate into  a  two-ounce  package  of  chick- 
en-feed. 

The  dairyman  declared  that  to  travel  in 


102  SUN  HUNTING 

the  way  he  was  traveling  cost  him  about 
one-third  as  much  as  it  would  have  cost  him 
to  travel  to  Florida  in  trains  and  to  live  at 
hotels  and  boarding-houses.  From  this 
statement  it  can  be  seen  that  one  doesn't 
necessarily  have  to  be  a  millionaire  in  order 
to  spend  a  winter  in  Florida. 


CHAPTER  VI 

OF     MRS.     JARLEY,     THE    ORIGINAL    TIN-CANNER OF 

THE  TWO  SCHOOLS  OF  TIN-CAN  THOUGHT — OF  THE 

HARD-BOILED   BACHELOR   WITH    THE   CONDENSED 

OUTFIT — AND   OF   FOLK    WHO  RIDE   ON   THE 

BACKS   OF  THEIR    NECKS 

MR.  CHARLES  DICKENS,  in  The  Old  Cu- 
riosity Shop,  described  the  original  luxurious 
tin-canning  vehicle;  but  Dickens  knew  the 
contraption  as  a  caravan.  And  instead  of 
being  motor-driven,  it  was,  of  course,  horse- 
drawn.  The  original  tin-can  tourist  appears 
to  have  been  Mrs.  Jarley,  proprietress  of 
Jarley's  Waxwork,  who  "rode  in  a  smart 
little  house  upon  wheels,  with  white  dimity 
curtains  festooning  the  windows,  and  win- 
dow shutters  of  green  picked  out  with  panels 
of  a  staring  red,  in  which  happily  contrasted 
colors  the  whole  concern  shone  brilliant. 
.  .  .  One-half  of  it  .  .  .  was  carpeted, 
and  so  partitioned  off  at  the  further  end  as 
to  accommodate  a  sleeping-place,  constructed 
103 


104  SUN  HUNTING 

after  the  fashion  of  a  berth  on  board  ship, 
which  was  shaded,  like  the  little  windows, 
with  fair  white  curtains,  and  looked  com- 
fortable enough,  though  by  what  kind  of 
gymnastic  exercise  the  lady  of  the  caravan 
ever  contrived  to  get  into  it,  was  an  unfath- 
omable mystery.  The  other  half  served  for 
a  kitchen,  and  was  fitted  up  with  a  stove 
whose  small  chimney  passed  through  the 
room.  It  held  also  a  closet  or  larder,  several 
chests,  a  great  pitcher  of  water,  and  a  few 
cooking  utensils  and  articles  of  crockery." 

Heated  discussions  arise  among  the  tin- 
canners  as  to  the  proper  size  of  a  camping 
outfit.  The  man  with  a  portable  bungalow 
scorns  the  man  who  jams  all  his  belongings 
into  a  small  space  as  being  an  old  woman 
and  a  tight-wad;  while  the  man  who  packs 
his  camping  outfit  into  the  small  machine 
views  the  portable  bungalow  owner  with  the 
utmost  contempt  as  being  inefficient,  spoiled 
by  luxury,  a  road  hog  and  a  slave  to  his 
belongings. 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  105 

In  Lemon  City,  a  suburb  of  Miami,  I 
found  a  tin-canner  whose  tin-canning  outfit 
was  probably  the  extreme  opposite  of  the 
portable  bungalow  outfit.  His  home  was 
Chicago,  and  since  early  autumn  he  had 
jounced  from  Chicago  down  to  Texas, 
around  the  eastern  side  of  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico,  down  the  west  coast  of  Florida  and 
up  the  east  coast. 

He  was  a  hard-boiled  bachelor  of  the  sort 
who  announces  loudly  that  he  doesn't  pro- 
pose to  bother  anybody  and  that  he  doesn't 
want  anybody  to  bother  him.  His  means  of 
locomotion  was  a  small  Ford  runabout  with 
a  box-like  contraption  behind  the  seat  similar 
to  that  used  by  salesmen  who  carry  their 
samples  around  with  them.  Nothing  was 
strapped  to  the  sides  or  the  running  boards 
of  the  machine ;  it  was  an  ordinary  runabout 
with  the  top  up  and  with  an  inconspicuous 
box  attached  behind.  Into  this  box,  which  a 
carpenter  had  built  for  him  for  a  matter  of 
seven  dollars,  the  tin-canner  had  packed 


io6  SUN  HUNTING 

everything  that  he  needed  for  a  five  months' 
camping  trip.  He  had  lain  awake  at  night 
for  years  doping  out  exactly  where  he  was 
going  to  carry  the  butter  and  how  he  could 
fry  the  eggs  with  the  least  commotion;  and 
the  final  result  was  a  masterpiece  of  com- 
pactness— or  such  compactness  that  if  any 
one  but  the  inventor  had  tried  to  repack  the 
camping  outfit,  he  might  have  sweated  over 
the  problem  for  two  hours  and  still  had 
enough  left  over  to  fill  a  freight  car. 

tThe  front  of  the  box  came  off  and  proved 
to  be  shelves  packed  with  tin  cans  and  other 
matters  pertaining  to  the  kitchen.  A  khaki 
top  and  sides  pulled  out  of  the  top  of  the 
box,  extending  straight  backward  from  the 
machine  top,  and  were  held  in  place  by  col- 
lapsible uprights.  The  seat  of  the  machine, 
laid  along  the  top  of  his  kitchen  shelves, 
formed  his  bed ;  and  on  this  was  placed  what 
he  called  a  shoulder-and-hip  mattress.  All  a 
person  needed,  he  explained,  was  a  mattress 
that  made  a  comfortable  resting-place  for 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  107 

his  hips  and  shoulders:  it  made  no  differ- 
ence what  became  of  his  legs.  His  cooking 
utensils,  including  a  collapsible  stove  no  big- 
ger than  a  fair-sized  inkwell,  came  out  of  a 
small  tin  suit-case.  He  had  every  move 
planned  out  in  detail. 

"In  the  morning,"  he  explained,  fondling 
his  outfit  with  the  proud  and  gentle  hands  of 
a  parent,  "I  get  up  and  eat  one  of  these  indi- 
vidual packages  of  breakfast  food.  While 
I'm  doing  that  the  water  is  boiling  for  my 
coffee,  and  as  soon  as  the  coffee  is  done,  I 
put  on  my  frying  pan  with  bacon  and  eggs 
in  it.  I  use  two  paper  napkins  for  my  table- 
cloth. When  I  have  finished  breakfast,  I 
put  the  eggshells  in  the  breakfast-food  box, 
wipe  out  the  frying-pan  with  the  napkins, 
put  them  into  the  box  on  top  of  the  egg- 
shells, and  touch  a  match  to  the  box.  That 
cleans  everything  up."  He  knew  exactly 
how,  when  and  where  he  was  going  to  do 
everything,  and  he  was  delighted  to  knock 
off  a  couple  of  days  to  explain  any  or  all  of 


io8  SUN  HUNTING 

his  well-ordered  regimen  to  any  one  who 
wanted  to  know  about  it.  He  would  even 
deign  to  explain  it  as  fully  as  possible  to 
some  who  didn't  want  to  know  about  it. 
One  of  his  greatest  pleasures  was  to  unpack 
and  pack  the  tin  suit-case  that  contained  his 
kitchen  utensils.  It  seemed  impossible  that 
any  human  agency  could  get  all  of  them  into 
the  space  at  his  disposal,  but  he  could  do  it 
almost  every  time.  Occasionally  he  would 
find  himself  with  a  frying-pan  left  over 
when  the  packing  was  finished ;  but  instead 
of  getting  excited  he  would  unpack  calmly 
and  coolly  and  fit  the  things  together  with  a 
practised  hand  until  there  was  nothing  left 
over.  He  had  a  collapsible  chair  that  dropped 
into  the  side  pocket  of  his  coat  and  took  up 
less  space  than  a  note-book.  He  had  a 
diminutive  double-ended  ice-cream  freezer. 
This  was  his  ice-chest.  Butter  went  in  one 
end  and  milk  or  cream  in  the  other.  The 
biggest  day  in  the  life  of  this  genius  will,  I 
believe,  be  when  he  discovers  a  collapsible 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  109 

frying  pan  that  will  fold  into  a  one-pound 
bacon  box. 

The  ordinary  tin-canner,  unlike  these  two 
extreme  examples,  is  content  with  an  ordi- 
nary, small  touring  car,  which,  when  in  mo- 
tion, has  a  part  of  his  camping  outfit  at- 
tached to  every  exposed  part  of  his  machine. 
The  tent  and  a  couple  of  suit-cases  are  at- 
tached to  one  running  board ;  mattresses  and 
blankets  are  attached  to  the  other;  cases  of 
canned  goods,  kitchen  utensils  and  other 
odds  and  ends  are  fixed  to  the  rear  or  con- 
cealed beneath  a  false  floor  in  the  tonneau. 
The  false  floor  is  frequently  carried  to  such 
an  extreme  that  the  occupants  of  the  automo- 
bile convey  the  impression  of  riding  around 
the  world  on  the  backs  of  their  necks.  When 
the  ordinary  tin-canners  break  out  their 
camping  outfit,  the  tent  extends  out  at  right 
angles  from  the  side  door  of  the  car,  so  that 
the  occupants  of  the  tent  can  use  the  car  as  a 
combination  lavatory,  sitting-room,  chiffonier, 
clothes  closet,  pantry  and  safe-deposit  vault. 


CHAPTER  VII 

OF  THE  MIGRANT  FROM    MARION OF  HIS  FEARS OF 

LAND    AT    A    NICKEL    AN     ACRE OF     SAND    FLEAS 

AND  SAND  SPURS OF  LONELINESS  AND  HONEY- 

MOONERS — AND    OF    THE    DOCTOR    WHO    WAS 
RUN  TO  DEATH 

I  CONFERRED  with  a  mild-spoken  tin-canner 
at  a  Miami  tin-can  camp  one  hot  February 
afternoon  as  to  tin-canning  in  general.  His 
wife,  who  was  a  capable  and  keen-witted 
lady  in  a  blue  gingham  dress,  sat  with  us  and 
dug  the  soft  substance  out  of  tiny  pine 
cones,  her  idea  being  to  sandpaper  them  and 
varnish  them  at  a  later  date,  and  make  them 
into  fascinating  strings  of  beads.  This  is 
one  of  the  most  popular  diversions  among 
lady  tin-canners — almost  as  popular  as  is 
horseshoe  pitching  among  the  male  tin-can- 
ners. 

The  tin-canner  was  a  non-committal  corn 
farmer  from  the  vicinity  of  that  newly- 

no 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  1 1 1 

famous  Ohio  town,  Marion.  Careful 
thought  on  his  part,  assisted  by  frequent 
promptings  from  his  wife,  brought  out  the 
following  information:  He  had  broken 
away  from  the  farm  for  the  winter  because 
he  preferred  sitting  around  where  it  was 
comfortably  warm  to  sitting  around  where 
it  was  uncomfortably  cold.  He  wasn't  par- 
ticularly struck  with  Florida  land,  but  he 
liked  the  Florida  air.  Looking  at  Florida 
land  with  the  eye  of  an  Ohio  farmer,  he  felt 
that  he  wouldn't  particularly  care  to  pay 
much  more  than  a  nickel  an  acre  for  most 
of  it.  He  met  up  with  a  lot  of  Michigan 
and  Ohio  farmers  along  the  road,  and  they 
felt  the  same  way  about  it.  Still,  it  was 
kind  of  restful  and  soothing  to  look  at,  and 
the  sun  and  the  air  more  than  made  up  for 
the  drawbacks  of  the  land.  The  sun  was 
nicer  just  to  sit  in  than  the  Ohio  sun,  and 
there  was  more  of  it.  This  Florida  sun 
made  a  person  feel  kind  of  trifling — trifling 
being  southern  and  mid-western  slang  for 


ii2  SUN  HUNTING 

lazy.  He  wouldn't  want  any  Florida  people 
to  hear  him  say  that  some  of  the  land  looked 
worthless,  because  they  would  probably  pass 
an  act  through  the  legislature  forbidding  him 
to  come  back  into  the  state  again — and  he 
wouldn't  like  that  because  it  was  a  real 
pleasant  place  to  come  back  to — in  the  win- 
ter. Besides,  you  couldn't  tell  much  about 
this  Florida  land  from  looking  at  it.  Some- 
thing that  was  a  swamp  one  year  would  be 
nice  solid  land  the  next  year  and  selling  for 
fifty  dollars  a  front  foot.  These  Florida 
people  were  real  touchy  people  and  you  had 
to  be  mighty  careful  what  you  said  when 
they  were  around.  The  sand  flies  pricked 
holes  in  him  every  afternoon,  but  he  pre- 
ferred not  to  mention  it  when  any  Florida 
people  were  around  for  fear  they  would 
say  he  was  a  California  man  that  had  been 
paid  to  come  over  and  cast  slurs  on  Florida's 
fair  name.  And  for  the  same  reason  he  dis- 
liked to  mention  the  sand  fleas  that  came 
up  out  of  the  sand  around  sun-down  and 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  113 

nipped  him  all  over  the  legs,  or  of  the  sand 
spurs  that  caught  in  the  trousers  and  felt  as 
though  several  people  were  prodding  him 
with  ice-picks. 

There  was  one  bad  feature  connected  with 
tin-canning,  and  that  was  loneliness.  There 
were  a  lot  of  honeymooners  among  the  tin- 
canners,  and  they  were  about  the  only  ones 
who  didn't  seem  to  get  lonely.  Unless  you 
had  a  couple  of  friends  to  travel  with,  or 
were  honeymooners,  you  were  apt  to  get 
lonely  and  homesick,  and  go  back  where  it 
was  cold,  and  be  sore  at  yourself  for  going 
back. 

They  were  traveling  with  a  doctor  and 
his  wife  from  back  home.  The  doctor  was 
the  only  doctor  in  the  neighborhood  and  he 
had  been  just  run  to  death.  Folks  wouldn't 
let  him  alone.  He  was  just. run  to  death. 
Somebody  was  getting  sick  every  minute, 
and  they'd  call  him  up  at  all  hours  of  the 
day  and  night  and  just  run  him  to  death. 
For  years  he'd  been  planning  to  take  a  vaca- 


ii4  SUN  HUNTING 

tion  and  rest  up,  but  they  ran  him  so  he 
couldn't.  So  finally  when  he  heard  that 
they  were  going  to  Florida,  he  just  up  and 
went.  Oh,  he  was  run  to  death,  but  a  few 
weeks  in  Florida  had  done  him  a  world  of 
good.  No,  he  didn't  know  how  his  former 
patients  were  getting  along.  Probably  they 
were  all  right.  Probably  there  was  some 
young  college  feller  looking  out  for  them. 
There  generally  was  in  a  case  like  that.  He 
didn't  know.  Things  like  that  didn't  worry 
you  much  when  you  struck  Florida  and 
began  to  sit  out  in  the  sun. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

OF   THE    MARVELOUS    SITTING   ABILITY   OF   THE   TIN- 

CANNERS OF  THE  PARKS   IN   WHICH   THEY   SIT — 

OF  THE  HORSESHOE  BUGS  AND  THE  CHECKER  AND 
DOMINO    BEETLES OF    THE    DELICATE    MOVE- 
MENTS OF  A  CELEBRATED  HORSESHOE  TOSSER 
— AND    OF    THE    INTERNATIONAL    HORSE- 
SHOE CLUB 

AND  so  we  return  to  the  great  craving  of 
the  sun-hunters:  to  sit  in  the  sun  and  take 
the  air.  Golf  is  a  matter  of  which  they 
know  little ;  tennis  is  regarded  as  a  game  for 
muscleless  smart  Alecks;  polo  might  be  a 
sort  of  dog  or  a  movie  actor — they're 
not  quite  sure  about  it;  sea-bathing  is 
a  diversion  in  which  they  rarely  indulge. 
But  they  are  remarkable  sitters.  Given  a 
bench  in  the  sun,  they  can  outsit  a  trained 
athlete  or  the  United  States  Senate. 

All  of  the  towns  and  cities  and  large  tin- 
can  camps  of  Florida  cater  to  the  sun-hunt- 
ers by  setting  apart  a  sunny  park  where  they 

US 


Ii6  SUN  HUNTING 

can  gather  and  commune  silently  or  mono- 
syllabically  with  one  another,  chew  tobacco, 
discuss  fertilizers,  cuss  the  administration 
and  indulge  in  the  games  to  which  they  are 
addicted.  Some  of  the  sun-hunters  who 
wear  the  benches  shiny  in  these  parks  are 
tin-canners;  and  some  are  seasonal  sun- 
hunters  who  have  left  their  farms  and  their 
businesses  in  the  North  and  hired  a  bunga- 
low in  Florida  for  two  hundred  or  four  hun- 
dred or  eight  hundred  or  one  thousand  dol- 
lars a  season;  and  some  are  professional 
sun-hunters  from  the  North  who  have  made 
barely  enough  money  to  last  them  the  rest 
of  their  lives  unless  the  country  goes  Bol- 
shevik or  unless  Congress  taxes  their  sav- 
ings out  of  existence  and  who  have  bought 
homes  for  themselves  in  Florida ;  and  a  very 
few  are  rebellious  husbands  from  the  big 
hotels  who  have  sneaked  away  from  the 
money-perfumed  atmosphere  of  the  time- 
killers  and  incurred  their  wives'  disgust  and 
loathing  by  mingling  with  the  rough-necks. 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  117 

Take,  for  example,  Royal  Palm  Park  at 
Miami.  It  is  larger  than  some  of  the  Flor- 
ida parks  for  sun-hunters;  but  the  people 
who  use  it  are  no  different  from  those  who 
use  similar  parks  all  over  Florida. 

On  one  side  of  the  park  is  Biscayne  Bay, 
with  ginger-breadish  house-boats  and  gleam- 
ing steam  yachts  and  broad-winged  flying 
boats  crowded  along  the  shore.  On  another 
side  is  Miami's  principal  business  street, 
lined  with  modern  office  buildings  and  up- 
to-the-minute  haberdasheries  and  modistes 
and  drug-stores  and  real-estate  offices  and 
hotels  and  soft-drink  emporiums  and  parked 
automobiles  and  bustling  shoppers. 

In  the  park  itself,  beneath  the  softly  rus- 
tling palms,  an  audience  of  silent  sun-hunt- 
ers, sprawled  on  benches  which  surround 
the  edges,  gaze  intently  at  the  long  double 
row  of  horseshoe  pitchers  and  at  a  score  of 
long  tables  crowded  with  men  who  are 
brooding  over  obviously  important  matters. 
The  men  at  the  tables  are  the  skilled  checker, 


ii8  SUN  HUNTING 

chess  and  domino  players  of  the  tin-can 
camps  and  the  sun-hunters'  colonies.  At 
one  table  one  afternoon  I  recognized  a  doc- 
tor who  had  cured  my  childish  ailments  in 
Maine  many  years  ago.  Opposite  him  was  a 
cattleman  from  Iowa.  Beside  him  was  a 
crippled  begger  and  panhandler  who  owned 
no  home  at  all ;  and  busily  playing  checkers 
with  the  panhandler  was  a  prosperous-look- 
ing small-town  banker  from  Illinois. 

Checker  and  domino  tournaments  of  ter- 
rifying ferocity  take  place  at  frequent  inter- 
vals. The  champion  checker  player  of 
Miami  issues  a  challenge  to  the  champion 
checker  player  of  West  Palm  Beach,  and 
the  outcome  is  awaited  with  breathless  inter- 
est. It  is  not  unusual  for  individuals  to 
wager  as  much  as  fifty  cents  on  the  result. 

For  hair-raising  excitement  and  action 
so  thrilling  that  it  frequently  causes  hard- 
ened sun-hunting  onlookers  to  swallow  their 
chews,  one  must  turn  to  the  horseshoe 
pitchers.  Horseshoe  pitching  is  the  repre- 


I 


O 


O 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  119 

sentative  sport  of  the  tin-canner  and  the 
sun-hunter,  just  as  the  representative  sport 
of  the  British  working  man  is  drinking  Bur- 
ton's and  just  as  the  representative  sport  of 
certain  African  tribes  is  wearing  rings  in 
their  noses. 

Just  as  an  Englishman  is  unable  to  see 
anything  in  baseball,  and  just  as  most 
Americans  yawn  heartily  at  the  mere  men- 
tion of  cricket,  so  is  the  ordinary  passer-by 
unable  to  detect  the  charm  in  horseshoe 
pitching.  He  sees  a  long  row  of  men  toss- 
ing horseshoes  at  iron  stakes  and  another 
long  row  of  men  digging  the  horseshoes  out 
of  the  dirt  and  tossing  them  back  at  other 
stakes.  But  the  sun-hunters  get  out  imme- 
diately after  breakfast  and  pitch  all  day  with 
feverish  intensity  and  passionate  concentra- 
tion, only  quitting  when  the  sun  goes  down 
behind  the  palms  in  a  golden  haze. 

Some  of  the  horseshoe  experts  carry 
their  private  horseshoes  with  them  in 
leather  bags,  and  it  is  not  unusual  for  an 


120  SUN  HUNTING 

aspiring  horseshoe  tosser  to  seek  out  tfie 
experts  and  pay  handsomely  for  copies  of 
the  instruments  with  which  they  won  to 
fame  and  high  position.  Thus  it  may  be 
seen  how  among  horseshoe  tossers,  as  well 
as  among  golfers,  ballplayers  and  others 
who  should  know  better,  the  delusion  per- 
sists that  a  workman  may  attain  perfection 
through  his  tools  instead  of  through  him- 
self. 

The  more  skilful  tossers  carry  with  them 
all  the  appliances  of  their  avocation — tape 
measures  with  which  to  measure  the  dis- 
tance of  the  shoes  from  the  stake;  calipers 
to  measure  their  distance  from  one  another  ; 
chalk  with  which  to  keep  score;  collapsible 
rakes  to  smooth  out  the  tumbled  dirt,  around 
the  stakes.  The  delicate  movements  of  a 
celebrated  tosser  as  he  hitches  up  his  gal- 
luses, spits  on  his  right  hand  and  tests  his 
muscles  by  sinking  to  a  semi-squatting  posi- 
tion and  rising  upright  again,  are  watched 
with  the  keenest  interest  by  large  crowds  of 


THE  TIN-CANNERS  121 

sun-hunters.  When  a  horseshoe  makes  a 
particularly  noteworthy  flight,  a  fusillade  of 
applausive  spitting  splashes  on  the  sun- 
baked ground 

There  is,  of  course,  an  International 
Horseshoe  Club.  It  is  too  important  an  or- 
ganization to  be  demeaned  with  a  merely 
local  name,  such  as  the  Horseshoe  Club  of 
America.  Then  there  are  local  chapters 
that  indulge  in  tournaments  at  which  feel- 
ing runs  high.  At  West  Palm  Beach,  when 
I  was  there,  a  new  pitch  was  being  prepared 
for  the  big  impending  tournament  with  Lake 
Worth.  An  international  polo  match  may 
get  more  publicity,  but  there's  more  quiet 
bitterness  over  a  horseshoe  tournament — 
much  more.  Especially  in  Florida. 

Those  who  weary  of  dominoes,  checkers, 
chess  and  horseshoe  pitching  are  at  liberty 
to  cut  a  bamboo  pole  and  sit  in  the  sun  be- 
side one  of  the  countless  rivers,  streams  and 
inlets  that  dent  the  Florida  coast.  These 
waters  are  full  of  trout,  bass,  red  snapper, 


122  SUN  HUNTING 

yellowtails,  pompano,  grunts — silvery  and 
delicious  fish  so-called  because  of  their 
noisy  and  peevish  growls  and  grunts  of  pro- 
test when  removed  from  the  water — and 
many  other  fish  whose  eating  and  fighting 
qualities  would  have  caused  Izaak  Walton 
to  swoon  with  delight. 

It's  hard  to  believe  that  the  North,  every 
winter,  is  full  of  people  who  hate  northern 
winters,  and  of  folk  who  don't  know  what 
to  do  with  themselves.  If  they  don't  know 
enough  to  become  sun-hunters,  they  deserve 
to  suffer. 


BOOK    THREE 

TROPICAL  GROWTH 


CHAPTER  I 

OF   THE   ENTHUSIASM    OF    ALL    GROWING    THINGS    IN 
FLORIDA — OF    PAW-PAWS    AND    PROSPECTUSES    AND 

PERFECT   THIRTY-FOURS OF   FIENDS   IN   HUMAN 

SHAPE AND  OF  THE  WATCHFULNESS  OF  THE 

NATIVES   FOR   INSULTS 

EVERYTHING  grows  in  Florida.  That  is  to 
say,  everything  grows  in  Florida  that  Flor- 
ida people  want  to  grow.  That  is  Florida's 
specialty:  growing.  Occasionally  a  few 
things  get  out  of  hand  and  indulge  in  some 
over-enthusiastic  growing  when  Florida 
people  wish  that  they  wouldn't;  but  for  the 
most  part  Florida  is  proud  of  the  remark- 
able growths  that  take  place  within  her 
boundaries.  This  is  particularly  true  of 
southern  Florida.  The  superlatives  as  well 
as  the  fish  grow  to  surprising  proportions: 
so  do  the  real-estate  advertisements  and  the 
avocados.  The  sun  is  larger  and  warmer 
than  in  other  parts  of  America;  and  the 

125 


126  SUN  HUNTING 

sky — unless  the  leading  Florida  author- 
ities are  mistaken  in  their  observations — is 
higher  and  bluer  than  elsewhere. 

There  are  only  three  things  that  southern 
Florida  has  never  made  any  effort  to  grow. 
These  are  mountains,  snow-storms  and 
earthquakes.  If  there  were  any  particular 
reason  for  her  to  grow  any  of  these  things, 
she  could  probably  arrange  to  pump  up  a 
few  square  miles  of  ocean  floor  and  pile  the 
sand  up  into  a  mountain  that  would  look 
like  a  blood  relative — say  a  grandson — of 
Fujiyama;  and  she  could  unquestionably 
find  a  way  to  raise  artificial  snow-storms 
that  would  make  Oregon  jealous,  and  earth- 
quakes that  would  shake  out  a  person's  eye- 
teeth.  Since  there  isn't  any  reason  for 
them,  she  specializes  on  more  useful  things 
like  paw-paws  and  prospectuses  and  perfect 
thirty-four  bathing-girls  and  what-not,  and 
secures  some  startling  results. 

Take  Miami,  for  example.  Before  taking; 
it,  one  should  understand  that  there  is  grave. 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          127 

clanger  in  taking  any  particular  city  in  Flor- 
ida to  the  exclusion  of  any  other  city,  because 
all  the  untaken  cities  immediately  feel 
slighted  and  begin  to  thirst  for  the  heart's 
blood  of  the  one  who  did  the  taking. 

Each  Florida  city  or  resort  is  violently 
jealous  of  every  other  resort  or  city.  The 
residents  of  Palm  Beach  speak  sneeringly  of 
Miami  as  being  a  bit  plebeian.  The  resi- 
dents of  Miami  speak  compassionately  of 
Palm  Beach,  as  young  and  pretty  girls 
speak  of  decaying  beauty.  St.  Petersburg 
and  Tampa  and  Miami  have  little  of  a  favor- 
able nature  to  say  concerning  one  another. 
They  only  unite  to  resist  attacks  from  re- 
sorts outside  the  state,  or  to  say  a  few  tart 
words  about  California. 

Every  little  while  some  fiend  in  human 
shape  prints  a  piece  in  a  South  Carolina  or 
North  Carolina  or  Georgia  paper  falsely 
accusing  a  Florida  city  of  harboring  a  few 
cases  of  typhoid  or  scarlet  fever,  or  of  being 
too  chilly  for  winter  bathing.  Instantly  the 


128  SUN  HUNTING 

Florida  people  rise  to  defend  the  state's  fair 
name;  and  the  low,  searing  curses  that  are 
hurled  against  the  foul  detractor  are  warm 
enough  to  singe  a  hog. 

Every  little  while,  too,  Florida  gets  a 
chance  to  slip  a  knife  into  her  hated  resort 
rival,  California;  and  when  the  chance 
occurs,  the  air  is  filled  with  a  deadly  swish- 
ing sound,  due  to  the  violence  with  which  the 
knife  is  inserted. 

A  snow-storm  in  California  causes  Flor- 
ida newspapers  to  spread  loud  and  exultant 
head-lines  entirely  across  their  front  pages, 
declaring  excitedly:  NO  LIVES  LOST  IN 
CALIFORNIA  BLIZZARD.  This  is  the 
negation  of  news  everywhere  except  in 
Florida;  but  Florida  smacks  her  lips  over  it 
with  the  keenest  delight.  She  emphasizes 
the  blizzard's  severity  by  shrieking  that  no 
lives  were  lost,  thus  implying  that  hundreds 
« — nay,  thousands — might  have  been  lost 
save  for  the  merest  chance.  She  is  so 
anxious  to  have  tourists  realize  that  she  is 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          129 

the  queen  of  winter  resorts  that  she  is  over- 
joyed when  another  resort-state  is  cursed 
with  a  phase  of  Nature  that  tends  to  dis- 
courage tourists. 

There  is  another  grave  danger  in  taking 
any  Florida  city  as  an  example.  The  natives 
of  Florida  winter  resorts  are  constantly  on 
the  qui  vive  for  slights  and  insults.  They 
are  so  much  on  the  qui  vive  in  this  respect 
that  there  is  scarcely  room  for  any  one  else 
on  it.  They  occupy  practically  the  entire 
qui  vive. 


CHAPTER  II 

OP    HOTEL    RATES— OF    MOSQUITOES — AND    OF    THE 

OUTCRY    AGAINST    THE    SHIPPING    BOARD    FOR 

DARING  TO  MENTION  EUROPE 

ONE  can  never  tell  beforehand  what 
statements,  phrases,  remarks,  words  or  in- 
flections— or  lack  of  these  things — the 
staunch  Floridans  will  regard  as  slighting 
or  insulting.  Sometimes  they  become  just 
as  fretful  if  you  don't  say  them  as  they  do 
if  you  do  say  them. 

There  is  the  matter  of  hotel  rates,  for 
example:  if  you  tell  what  they  are  at  the 
best  hotels,  all  Florida  reviles  you  for  fright- 
ening tourists  away.  If  you  tell  what  they 
are  at  the  cheaper  hotels,  the  owners  and 
officials  of  the  best  hotels  curse  you  bitterly 
for  representing  Florida  as  a  cheap  place. 
Evidently  they  want  you  to  lie  about  the 
hotel  rates;  but  if  you  do,  they  will  call  you 
a  liar. 

130 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          131 

Then  there  is  the  little  matter  of  mosqui- 
toes. Usually  there  are  not  mosquitoes 
along  the  Florida  coastline  between  the 
months  of  November  and  March,  inclusive, 
because  the  prevailing  winds  drive  them 
inland.  Occasionally,  however,  the  wind 
shifts  or  the  atmosphere  is  unduly  affected 
by  the  hemisphere  or  something  technical; 
and  the  tough,  leathery,  muscular,  hungry 
Florida  mosquitoes  are  blown  down  to  the 
shore,  where  they  sink  their  dagger-like 
beaks  into  the  soft  white  flesh  of  the  north- 
ern tourists. 

It  is  only  occasionally,  it  should  be  under- 
stood, that  such  a  catastrophe  occurs.  Oc- 
casionally at  Palm  Beach  one  is  told  with 
hoarse  jeering  laughter  that  there  are  mos- 
quitoes at  Miami;  but  when  one  gets  to 
Miami  he  finds  no  mosquitoes,  and  is  told 
with  cold  emphasis  that  there  aren't  any  in 
Miami — but  that  there  are  many  of  them  at 
Palm  Beach.  And  so  it  goes.  If  one  doesn't 
mention  the  Palm  Beach  mosquitoes,  one 


132  SUN  HUNTING 

runs  the  risk  of  being  viewed  with  abhor- 
rence by  the  Miami  folk;  and  if  one  doesn't 
mention  the  Miami  mosquitoes,  one  is  apt 
to  be  regarded  with  loathing  by  the  Palm 
Beach  boosters.  And  if  one  goes  back 
North  and  makes  any  mention  whatever  of 
mosquitoes  in  Florida,  he  is  more  than  likely 
to  be  enthusiastically  damned  by  every  Flor- 
idan  as  a  vile  prevaricator. 

Not  long  ago  the  Shipping  Board  in  its 
advertisements  emphasized  the  delights  of 
winter  travel  in  Europe.  Instantly  the 
watchful  Floridans  leaped  to  their  feet  with 
ear-piercing  shrieks  of  protest.  A  govern- 
ment bureau,  they  screamed,  was  taking  the 
money  of  Florida  taxpayers  to  advertise 
winter  attractions  in  competition  with  their 
own.  The  entire  state  had  never  been  so 
insulted  in  its  life;  and  the  wrathful  cries 
which  went  forth  traveled  all  the  way  to 
Washington  and  knocked  unsightly  chips 
from  many  of  the  capital's  ivory  domes.  As 
a  result,  the  Shipping  Board  promised  to 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          133 

change  its  policy,  and  the  touchy  Floridans 
became  calmer — though  it  is  difficult  for  the 
outsider  to  see  how  the  Shipping  Board  can 
advertise  at  all  in  the  winter  without  enter- 
ing into  competition  with  Florida.  But  you 
never  can  tell.  You  never  can  tell.  It  is 
about  as  safe  to  write  about  Florida  as  it 
would  be  to  kick  carelessly  at  the  nubbins 
on  a  floating  mine. 


CHAPTER  III 

OF    PALM    TREES — OF    VARIETIES    OF    FISH — AND    OF 
FRUIT  AND  LIARS  AND  BARON  MUNCHAUSEN 

LET  us  return  to  the  matter  of  growth 
in  southern  Florida.  Everything,  as  has 
been  said,  grows  there.  There  are  twenty- 
nine  varieties  of  palm  trees;  and  one  can 
spend  an  entire  week  doing  nothing  but 
check  up  palm  trees.  According  to  official 
count  there  are  two  hundred  and  seventy- 
five  different  varieties  of  fish  in  southern 
Florida  waters — or  there  were  toward  the 
middle  of  last  February.  A  new  variety  is 
discovered  every  week.  Unofficial  counters 
say  that  there  are  more  than  seven  hundred 
varieties.  The  unofficial  ones  are  probably 
nearer  right  than  the  official  ones.  There 
are  so  many  different  varieties  of  fruit  that 
if  one  attempted  to  eat  every  variety  in  one 
day,  he  would  unquestionably  burst  with  a 

J34 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          135 

loud  majority  report.  A  partial  list  of 
fruits  which  are  being  successfully  raised 
in  Florida's  southernmost  county,  provided 
by  a  man  with  a  poor  memory,  contains 
avocado — or  alligator  pear,  custard  apple, 
mammea  apple,  Jamaica  apple,  rose  apple, 
Bugamot,  citron,  banana,  Barbadoes  cherry, 
chermoyas,  cecropia,  Surinam  cherry,  'ca- 
rissa,  Jackfruit,  lime,  lemon,  loquat,  various 
sorts  of  mangoes,  fifty-seven  different 
varieties  of  orange,  a  number  of  crosses 
between  oranges  and  other  things,  grape- 
fruit, eggfruit,  dates,  olives,  monsterosa 
deliciosa,  papaya,  pomegranate,  Japanese 
persimmon,  sour  sop,  sapote,  sapodillo,  straw- 
berry, tomato.  If  a  Floridan  has  plenty  of 
time  at  his  disposal,  he  can  think  up  twenty 
or  thirty  more  fruits  that  are  fruiting  con- 
stantly and  energetically  in  southern  Florida. 
One  of  the  unfortunate  features  of  dis- 
cussing southern  Florida  lies  in  the  fact  that 
if  one  isn't  careful,  his  non-Florida  or  anti- 
Florida  hearers  will  suspect  him  of  having 


136  SUN  HUNTING 

taken  money  to  advertise  the  state.  They 
will,  in  short,  suspect  him  of  exaggeration 
when  he  carelessly  mentions  the  ever-sunny 
skies  and  the  perfect-thirty-four  bathing 
girls  and  the  amazing  growths.  The  whole 
subject  is  fraught  with  risks.  Baron  Mun- 
chausen  would  never  have  been  able  to 
work  up  a  reputation  as  a  liar  in  southern 
Florida,  because  his  lies  weren't  much  more 
startling  than  the  things  that  happen  there 
every  day.  But  if  the  Baron  had  sand- 
wiched a  few  Florida  facts  among  his  lies 
and  had  tried  them  out  on  his  neighbors 
some  evening  after  his  second  gallon  of 
Dortmunder  beer,  they  would  have  slapped 
one  another  on  the  back  and  rolled  around 
in  their  chairs  with  tears  of  mirth  pouring 
down  their  cheeks,  and  assured  one  another 
between  their  spasmodic  gasps  and  groans 
of  merriment  that  there  never  would  be 
anybody  in  the  world  who  would  be  able  to 
tell  such  downright  ridiculous,  preposterous, 
side-splitting,  hair-raising  lies  as  the  Baron. 


CHAPTER  IV 

OP     MIAMI     AND     OF     TROPICAL     GROWTH — OF     THE 

GROWING  OF  A  SHINGLE  INTO  A  BUNGALOW — OF 

THE  POPULATION  OF   MIAMI   IN    1980 — AND 

OF  THE   PRONUNCIATION    OF    MIAMI 

TAKE  Miami,  for  example.  In  1896 
Miami  consisted  of  two  small  dwellings  and 
a  storehouse.  Sometimes  as  many  as  ten 
Seminole  Indians  would  be  seen  in  the  vi- 
cinity of  these  buildings  at  one  time,  and 
the  occupants  of  the  dwellings  would 
scarcely  be  able  to  sleep  that  night  because 
of  their  excitement  at  seeing  such  a  throng 
of  people. 

In  1910,  Miami  had  a  population  of  5,471. 
In  1920  there  were  about  30,000  people  liv- 
ing there.  In  1922  there  were  40,000. 
That's  the  way  things  go  in  Florida.  Once 
let  a  thing  get  a  foothold,  and  it  grows  so 
rapidly  that  the  general  effect  is  more  that 
of  an  explosion  than  a  growth. 

137 


138  SUN  HUNTING 

Grass  grows  with  such  enthusiasm  in 
Miami  that  one  can't  merely  plant  seed  and 
let  it  grow.  If  one  did  that  the  grass  would 
come  in  so  thick  that  it  would  choke  itself. 
What  one  does  is  to  plant  the  seed  and  then, 
when  the  seed  has  sprouted,  transplant  the 
spears  of  grass  so  that  they're  six  inches 
apart. 

Tree  culture  is  very  simple.  A  small  piece 
of  wood  the  size  of  a  toothpick  is  stuck  in 
moist  sand.  At  the  end  of  four  years  the 
toothpick  has  grown  into  a  hibiscus  bush 
twenty  feet  high  and  twenty  feet  across. 
The  publisher  of  the  leading  Miami  paper 
declares  that  in  some  sections  of  the  city 
the  soil  is  so  fertile  that  if  a  shingle  is 
planted  in  it  before  sun-up,  it  will  grow  into 
a  fully  equipped  bungalow  by  nightfall. 
Other  fish  stories  will  be  taken  up  in 
another  place. 

Miami  surges  ahead  so  rapidly  that  none 
of  its  citizens  dares  to  stand  still  for  a  mo- 
ment in  order  to  watch  it  grow  for  fear  that 


r    '*  &  I 

'•      •  ff  ^»-  ,     *'.s*    4 


Photograph  byW.A.  FiMaugh 
One  of  Miami's  many  beautiful  public  schools. 


Photograph  byW.A.  Fishbaugk 

Private  yachts  and  house-boats  tied  up  at  the  foot  of  Miami's  principal 
shopping  street. 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          139 

he'll  be  left  so  far  behind  that  he'll  never 
catch  up.  If  he  makes  a  prediction,  he 
makes  a  running  prediction;  never  a  stand- 
ing prediction.  If  he  sells  a  piece  of  land — 
and  it's  as  natural  for  a  Miami  citizen  to  sell 
a  piece  of  land  as  it  is  for  him  to  have  coffee 
for  breakfast — he  is  very  likely  to  name  a 
price  that  the  land  will  reach  to-morrow  in- 
stead of  the  price  that  it  has  reached  to-day. 
He  is  always  moving  ahead  of  the  city. 

The  population  of  Miami  has  increased 
four  hundred  and  forty  per  cent,  in  the  last 
ten  years.  Therefore  the  Miami  people 
figure  that  it  will  easily  increase  another 
four  hundred  and  forty  per  cent,  in  the  next 
ten  years.  They  claim  that  the  city's  popu- 
lation in  1925  will  be  one  hundred  thousand, 
and  that  in  1930  it  will  be  two  hundred  thou- 
sand. Proceeding  at  that  rate,  its  popula- 
tion in  1950  will  be  five  million;  and  by 
1980  practically  every  one  in  North  America 
will  be  pushing  and  crowding  in  his  effort 
to  squeeze  into  the  city. 


140  SUN  HUNTING 

It  is,  of  course,  quite  obvious  to  the  effete 
and  blase  northerner  that  the  claims  made 
by  the  Miami  folk  show  that  there  are  some 
screws  loose  on  their  claimers.  The  Miami 
people,  however,  say  that  the  northern 
people  don't  know  how  to  adjust  their  views 
to  a  rapidly  growing  city — that  they  stand 
still  to  look  at  it;  and  that  while  they  are 
looking,  the  city  grows  out  of  focus.  They 
prove  their  theory  by  the  following 
anecdote : 

A  short  time  ago  the  telephone  company 
sent  down  estimators  to  look  at  Miami  and 
estimate  its  population  in  another  ten  years, 
in  order  that  the  company  might  be  able  to 
install  the  proper-sized  telephone  switch- 
board. The  estimators  looked,  made  careful 
estimates,  and  reported  that  the  population 
would  be  one  hundred  thousand  in  ten 
years'  time.  The  telephone  company  burst 
into  loud  howls  of  derision.  "You're 
crazy!"  it  cried  to  the  estimators.  "Who 
ever  told  you  that  you  could  estimate? 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          141 

Somebody  must  be  paying  you  to  boost  the 
place!  Get  out  of  the  way  and  let  us  send 
down  some  regular  estimators!"  So  the 
company  sent  down  some  new  estimators; 
and  these  estimators  in  turn  looked  over  the 
ground  and  did  some  careful  estimating. 
They  then  returned  and  reported  that  the 
population  in  ten  years'  time  would  be  one 
hundred  and  twenty  thousand.  The  tele- 
phone company,  without  more  ado,  installed 
a  switchboard  based  on  that  estimate.  But 
the  Miami  people  claim  that  the  estimators 
were  making  stationary  estimates,  and  that 
the  difference  between  the  estimates  of  the 
first  and  the  second  estimators  was  merely 
due  to  the  fact  that  the  city  had  moved  for- 
ward between  their  visits.  If  they  had 
known  how  to  place  themselves  en  rapport, 
so  to  speak,  with  the  city  and  move  forward 
with  it,  both  of  them  would  have  estimated 
that  the  population  would  be  two  hundred 
thousand  in  ten  years'  time. 

At  any  rate,  the  real-estate  operations  in 


142  SUN  HUNTING 

Miami — and  the  word  Miami,  by  the  way, 
is  pronounced  My-amma  by  every  one 
except  the  uncultured  folk  who  insist  on  pro- 
nouncing it  as  spelled — the  real-estate  opera- 
tions in  Miami  are  on  a  scale  that  will  pro- 
vide building  lots  for  twenty  million  people 
by  1930. 


CHAPTER  V 

OF  REAL-ESTATE  DEALERS OF  THE  LARGE  HANDSOME 

SALESMEN OF    NOISY   AUCTIONS OF  ABSOLUTE 

AND      UNABSOLUTE     AUCTIONS AND     OF 

PRICES    FOR   EVERY   POCKETBOOK 

» 

THE  exact  number  of  real-estate  dealers 
in  Miami  is  not  known.  Practically  every 
one  over  eighteen  years  of  age  dabbles  in 
real-estate  at  one  time  or  another.  Almost 
every  one  owns  a  lot  somewhere  that  he  is 
anxious  to  get  rid  of,  although  it  is  unani- 
mously admitted  by  the  owners  that  every 
lot  in  Miami  will  double  in  value  in  a  year's 
time.  Almost  every  other  doorway  along 
Miami's  crowded  streets  shelters  a  real- 
estate  firm ;  and  whole  coveys  of  real-estate 
firms  are  frequently  sheltered  in  buildings 
that  would  be  considered  small  by  a  family 
of  three  people. 

Some  of  the  firms  keep  impressive-look- 
ing salesmen  standing  just  outside  of  the 

*43 


144  SUN  HUNTING 

building  in  which  the  firms  do  business. 
These  salesmen  are  large,  handsome  men 
for  the  most  part,  strikingly  dressed  in  white 
trousers,  pearl  gray  sack  coats,  white  shoes, 
white  belts,  white  neckties  and  straw  hats 
tilted  knowingly  toward  the  right  ear.  If 
one  stops  for  a  moment  to  admire  a  window 
display  which  shows  automobiles,  diamonds 
and  tax-exempt  bonds  sprouting  from  the 
super-fertile  soil  of  land  that  is  on  sale 
within  at  one  thousand  dollars  an  acre,  one 
of  the  salesmen  is  very  apt  to  come  up  behind 
him  and  tempt  him  with  honeyed  words.  It 
is  almost  futile  to  struggle  against  these 
salesmen.  Unless  one  possesses  an  iron 
will,  he  will  weakly  permit  himself  to  be 
coaxed  within  the  portals  of  the  office, 
where  he  will  spend  the  better  part  of  an 
hour  looking  at  meaningless  maps  and  hear- 
ing large  sums  of  money  mentioned  with 
the  utmost  carelessness  and  disrespect. 

Other  real-estate  firms  constantly  carry 
on  selling  campaigns  that  strongly  resemble 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          145 

— in  noise,  at  least — the  return  of  the  Twen- 
ty-seventh Division  from  the  War.  They  re- 
sort to  brass  bands,  numbers  of  sight-seeing 
automobiles,  silver-tongued  orators  to  cajole 
the  crowd,  and  advertisements  that  inflame 
the  acquisitive  spirit  of  every  beholder. 
When  newcomers  see  a  monster  parade  of 
automobiles,  headed  by  a  blaring  band, 
swinging  through  the  streets  of  Miami, 
they  usually  think,  in  their  innocence,  that 
a  three-ring  circus  has  come  to  town.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  it  is  only  the  firm  of  Yam- 
mer &  Yawp  taking  a  mob  of  prospects  out 
to  its  daily  auction  sale  of  lots  at  Rubber 
Plant  Park. 

Skilled  and  expensive  real-estate  auc- 
tioneers are  imported  from  California  and 
New  York— auctioneers  capable  of  selling 
refrigerating  machines  to  inhabitants  of 
the  Arctic  Circle.  People  are  lured  to  the 
auctions  by  free  lunches,  by  distribution  of 
souvenirs,  by  the  giving  away  of  automo- 
biles. "We  give  away,"  advertises  one  sub- 


[46  SUN  HUNTING 

division  owner,  "a  new  Ford  car  each  Mon- 
day or  its  equivalent  in  cash,  and  other 
valuable  gifts  daily  for  the  duration  of  the 
sale.  And  we  will  entertain  those  who 
attend  the  sales  with  Any  Amusements  We 
Are  Able  To  Provide."  The  exact  meaning 
of  the  last  phrase  is  shrouded  in  mystery, 
but  it  makes  its  appeal  to  those  who  read 
between  the  lines. 

"Remember,"  shouts  another  firm,  "Re- 
member, We  Are  Giving  Away  Absolutely 
Gratis  a  Sedan  to  the  Person  Holding  the 
Lucky  Number — Get  Your  Free  Ticket 
Now."  "Auction!  Auction!  Auction!" 
bawls  another.  "Beautiful  and  useful  sou- 
venirs and  prizes  to  be  given  away."  "Come 
ride  in  our  busses  and  win  our  free  prizes," 
coaxes  another. 

Early  in  1922  the  real-estate  firms  which 
disposed  of  their  land  by  auction  were  vocif- 
erating passionately  that  their  auctions 
were  bona  fide,  that  they  were  "legitimate 
and  sound,"  that  they  were  "without  re- 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          147 

serve,"  that  they  were  absolute.  "Absolute 
auctions"  was  the  watchword  of  the  hour. 
The  inference  was,  of  course,  that  a  num- 
ber of  auction  sales  had  been  held  that  were 
not  absolute.  "One  Thousand  Dollars  Re- 
ward," stated  one  firm  in  a  dignified  but 
bean-spilling  manner,  "will  be  paid  for  the 
proof  of  any  buy-bidder  at  any  of  our  sales. 
The  opportunity  of  opportunities  to  buy  a 
piece  of  the  richest  garden  and  fruit  land  in 
southern  Florida.  Remember,  you  make  the 
price  and  every  lot  put  up  will  positively 
be  sold  to  the  highest  and  best  bidder  with- 
out limit  or  reserve." 

This  was  what  had  been  happening: 
Real-estate  firms  had  advertised  auctions, 
put  up  lots  for  sale,  and,  when  those  in  at- 
tendance languidly  refused  to  bid  more  than 
six  or  seven  dollars  for  a  lot,  used  profes- 
sional buyers  to  make  phony  bids  in  order 
either  to  run  up  the  price  or  get  the  lots  off 
the  market.  It  is  possible  that  such  a  thing 
will  never  happen  again,  now  that  real-estate 


148  SUN  HUNTING 

firms  have  the  habit  of  advertising  absolute 
auctions — possible,  but  scarcely  probable. 
With  five  or  six  auctions  being  held  each 
day,  and  with  large  numbers  of  unattractive 
lots  being  offered  to  stolid  middle-western- 
ers who  have  come  more  for  the  free  lunch 
and  the  automobile  ride  than  for  the  real- 
estate,  it  is  inevitable  that  some  lots  will  go 
for  about  one  dollar  and  seventy-five  cents 
if  everything  is  left  in  the  hands  of  the 
legitimate  prospects.  Common  sense  tells 
us  that  no  real-estate  dealer  could  stand 
such  a  blow  without  emitting  raucous 
shrieks  of  pain,  no  matter  how  persuasively 
and  convincingly  he  may  chatter  about 
absolute  auctions. 

Some  of  the  real-estate  dealers  allow  cus- 
tomers to  buy  land  on  terms  that  would 
attract  even  Trotsky,  who  doesn't  believe  in 
that  sort  of  thing.  Four-hundred-dollar 
lots  in  one  subdivision  can  be  had  for 
twenty  dollars  cash  and  ten  dollars  a  month, 
with  no  interest  or  taxes  for  a  year.  In 


TROPICAL  GROWTH  149 

another  subdivision,  one-thousand-two-hun- 
dred-and-fifty-dollar  lots  sell  for  one  hun- 
dred dollars  cash  and  twenty-five  dollars  a 
month  until  twenty  per  cent,  of  the  principal 
has  been  paid,  after  which  the  buyer  can 
sink  back  and  refrain  from  paying  any 
more  on  his  principal  for  seven  and  a  half 
years.  A  firm  advertises  island  water-front 
lots  at  five  thousand  seven  hundred  and 
fifty  dollars  a  lot,  the  terms  being  "seven 
hundred  and  fifty  cash;  balance  five  hun- 
dred every  six  months;  no  interest  first 
year ;  no  taxes  till  spring  1925." 


CHAPTER  VI 

OF   SUBDIVISIONS,    WISE   AND   OTHERWISE — OF   LAND- 
SCAPE ATROCITIES OF  SMALL  FARMS  AND  FARM- 
ERS— AND     OF      FASCINATING      STRAWBERRY 
AND   TOMATO   STATISTICS 

SUBDIVISIONS  extend  out  of  Miami  in  all 
directions — up  the  coast  and  down  the  coast 
and  inland  and  out  into  the  bay  in  the  shape 
of  islands.  Palm  Beach  is  seventy-five  miles 
north  of  Miami ;  and  there  are  almost  enough 
subdivisions  along  that  seventy- five  mile 
stretch  to  provide  homes  for  a  million 
people. 

Some  of  the  subdivisions  are  beautiful 
and  some  of  them  are  horrible.  Some  have 
been  thoroughly  cleared  of  the  tangled 
jungle  of  palmettos  and  other  scrub  that 
makes  a  total  mess  of  all  undeveloped  Flor- 
ida land;  and  flawless  roads  and  pavements 
have  been  constructed,  water  mains  put  in, 
and  gas,  water  and  electricity  provided. 

150 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          151 

Restrictions  are  imposed  in  some  of  the 
good  ones:  homes  costing  less  than  four 
thousand  can  not  be  built  on  certain  lots, 
while  on  other  lots  they  must  cost  at  least 
fifteen  thousand. 

Other  subdivisions  are  laid  out  purely  and 
simply,  as  the  saying  goes,  for  the  purpose 
of  separating  the  sucker  from  his  money. 
The  streets  are  half-laid,  the  location  is 
vile,  and  the  shacks  that  are  run  up  on  the 
crowded  lots  are  little  better  than  the  marsh- 
huts  of  Revere  Beach  and  Coney  Island  to 
which  poverty-stricken  city  dwellers  of 
Boston  and  New  York  frequently  repaired 
during  the  heated  terms  of  the  early 
'eighties. 

On  top  of  these  depressing  spectacles, 
many  of  which  may  some  day  be  partly 
obscured  in  tropical  verdure,  certain  enter- 
prising citizens  of  Miami  have  added  to 
Florida's  scenic  beauties  by  lining  the  road- 
sides with  blatant  sign-boards  setting  forth" 
the  delights  of  garages,  restaurants,  cloth- 


152  SUN  HUNTING 

ing  emporia  and  similar  enterprises.  Not 
content  with  building  self-sustaining  sign- 
boards which  protrude  gauntly  and  repul- 
sively from  the  flat  landscape  and  convince 
the  newcomer  that  he  is  approaching  a 
slum-city,  they  have  nailed  countless  num- 
bers of  huge  yellow  monstrosities  to  the 
palms  and  fruit-trees  along  the  highways — 
signs  that  have  no  influence  on  any  one 
except  the  lover  of  beauty,  and  which  only 
serve  to  fill  him  with  contempt  for  people 
who  can  permit  the  few  natural  beauties  of 
their  surroundings  to  be  so  befouled.  In 
the  North  one  expects  to  find — as  he  does 
find — a  plague  of  sign-boards,  and  hideous 
summer  resorts  whose  predominant  fea- 
tures are  those  of  the  awful  and  tasteless 
'eighties.  In  the  new  South,  however,  which 
lures  tourists  with  honeyed  words  and 
promises  of  every  sort  of  beauty,  the  erect- 
ing of  roadside  sign-boards  should  be 
viewed  with  as  much  disgust  and  loathing 
as  grapefruit-stealing  or  murder — both  of 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          153 

which  crimes  fall  under  somewhat  the  same 
head  in  Miami. 

Spreading  through  and  beyond  the  sub- 
divisions are  the  orange  and  grapefruit 
groves,  and  the  truck  gardens  and  vegetable 
farms.  Oranges  and  grapefruit  are  so 
common  in  southern  Florida  that  grape- 
fruit are  served  free  in  many  of  the  hotels ; 
while  many  other  hotels  keep  large  bowls  of 
free  oranges  alongside  the  ice-water  tank. 
So  far  as  is  known,  these  are  the  only  things 
that  one  has  a  chance  of  getting  for  nothing 
in  Florida  hotels. 

There  are  hundreds  of  three-acre  and 
five-acre  farms  owned  by  northerners  who 
didn't  like  winter,  and  ran  away  from  it 
with  one  or  two  thousand  dollars  in  their 
pockets.  Many  of  these  little  farmers  not 
only  manage  to  make  both  ends  meet,  but 
even  salt  away  comfortable  bank  rolls.  One 
little  town  near  Miami  shipped  sixty-one 
thousand  quarts  of  strawberries  to  northern 
cities  during  the  first  six  weeks  of  the  1922 


154  SUN  HUNTING 

season,  and  the  growers'  share  of  the  spoils 
was  fifty  cents  a  quart.  The  wise  straw- 
berry farmers,  who  plant  their  land  to  vel- 
vet beans  during  the  summer  and  plow  them 
under  in  September,  and  otherwise  indulge 
in  the  clever  tricks  of  the  trade,  get  some 
very  snappy  results.  One  of  the  best  straw- 
berry farmers  near  Miami  had  four  and 
one-tenth  acres  of  land  planted  to  straw- 
berries in  1921.  His  first  berries  came  in 
on  December  twentieth,  and  he  picked  twice 
a  week  until  July  fifteenth.  The  total  yield 
of  his  four  and  one-tenth  acres  was  41,059 
quarts,  his  average  price  for  each  quart  was 
forty-five  cents,  and  his  gross  sales 
amounted  to  slightly  over  eighteen  thousand 
five  hundred  dollars.  His  total  expenses 
were  a  little  over  six  thousand  dollars. 

More  than  eight  thousand  acres  are 
planted  to  tomatoes  in  the  vicinity  of  Miami, 
and  nearly  five  hundred  thousand  crates 
were  shipped  north  during  the  1921  season. 
These  tomatoes  bring  the  growers  about 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          155 

three  dollars  a  crate,  of  which  about  a  dollar 
and  seventy-five  cents  must  be  charged  off 
to  fertilizer,  labor,  hauling  and  crating. 
The  life  of  a  tomato  farmer  is  not  a  happy 
one,  for  the  crop  is  very  sensitive  to  wet 
weather.  It  is  also  very  sensitive  to  dry 
weather.  The  slightest  nip  of  frost  also 
puts  a  severe  crimp  in  it.  Some  of  the 
tomato  farmers  say  that  the  plant  is  so  sen- 
sitive that  if  a  man  cusses  or  chews  tobacco 
in  its  vicinity,  it  will  refuse  to  bear.  In 
spite  of  all  this,  there  are  plenty  of  tomato- 
lovers  to  plant  tomatoes  every  winter,  and 
some  of  them  have  made  fortunes  out  of  this 
popular  fruit — or  vegetable. 


CHAPTER  VII 

OF      THE      SUSPICIOUS      STORIES      CONCERNING      THE 
MANGO — OF  THE  PET  MANGO  OF  THE  MIAMIANS 
AND    OF    ITS    SUPERIORITY    TO    OTHER    THINGS 

THE  cupidity  of  farmers  who  are  sick  of 
northern  winters  is  easily  aroused  by  prices 
obtained  for  the  best  varieties  of  mangoes. 
'Their  rich,  spicy  flavor,  tempting  fra- 
grance and  beautiful  coloring,"  say  the 
Miami  prospecti,  "make  them  one  of  the 
most  tempting  table  desserts  that  can  be 
imagined."  Miami,  it  appears,  has  a  mo- 
nopoly on  this  fruit,  and  the  catalogues  rub 
in  the  bad  news  by  adding  that  "this 
monopoly  is  not  only  confined  to  the  cultiva- 
tion, but  also  to  the  exquisite  joy  of  eating  it, 
as  very  few  find  their  way  to  the  northern 
markets,  the  local  demand  far  exceeding 
the  supply."  One  reads  that  the  choicest 
varieties  "readily  sell  in  the  northern  mar- 

156 


TROPICAL  GROWTH  157 

kets  for  from  one  dollar  to  one  dollar  and 
fifty  cents  each/'  thus  confirming  the  skep- 
tical northerner  in  the  belief  of  the  late  P. 
T.  Barnum  that  there  was  one  born  every 
minute.  The  weak  spot  in  this  argument  is 
not  visible  offhand  to  the  doubting  Thom- 
ases from  the  North  who  spend  the  winter 
in  Florida.  The  mango  ripens  in  summer — 
in  June  and  July — so  the  winter  visitors 
can  not  sink  their  teeth  in  the  widely  adver- 
tised fruit.  Consequently  they  always  feel 
sure  that  there  is  some  good  reason  why  the 
Florida  people  prefer  the  exquisite  joy  of 
eating  the  mango  to  the  even  more  exquisite 
joy  of  shaking  down  their  northern  brothers 
for  one  dollar  and  fifty  cents  per  mango. 
Strangely  enough,  there  is  no  Ethiopian 
concealed  anywhere  in  the  mango  woodpile, 
although  any  one  who  aspires  to  become  a 
mango-grower  may  have  his  first  fine  en- 
thusiasm dashed  by  the  fact  that  mango 
trees  don't  begin  bearing  until  five  to  seven 
years  after  they  have  been  set  out ;  and  seven 


158  SUN  HUNTING 

years  is  a  long  time  to  wait,  especially  if  one 
is  hunting  for  quick  returns. 

The  mango  in  its  finest  form,  however,  is 
worth  waiting  seven  years  for.  The  mango 
with  which  northerners  are  familiar  is  a 
small,  mottled,  unhealthy-looking  fruit  about 
the  size  of  a  large  lemon.  The  interior  is 
partly  mushy  and  partly  stringy,  and  it  gets 
tangled  up  in  the  teeth  in  a  most  annoying 
manner.  The  general  effect  obtained  from 
dallying  with  it  is  that  the  mango  is  a  total 
loss.  The  pet  mango  of  the  Miamians  is  a 
very  different  proposition.  It  is  known  as 
the  Hayden  mango,  and  is  about  the  size  of 
a  large  coconut.  When  ripe  it  is  rosy  red 
all  over,  and  has  the  fragrance  of  a  flower. 
It  is  a  baffling  fruit  to  open,  as  its  seed  is 
about  the  size  and  shape  of  the  cuttle-bone 
used  as  an  aid  to  canaries'  digestions.  The 
unskilled  mango  eater  will  frequently  wreck 
an  entire  mango  trying  to  worry  it  open 
gently;  but  he  eventually  learns  that  one 


TROPICAL  GROWTH  159 

must  wring  its  neck  in  a  brutal  manner  to 
get  the  best  results. 

The  meat  of  the  Hayden  mango  is  sweeter 
than  that  of  any  other  fruit  I  know ;  and  it 
has  a  peculiar  and  delicious  taste  and  aroma 
of  pine  forests.  Years  ago  my  grandfather, 
in  the  spring  of  the  year,  would  go  prowling 
through  the  New  Hampshire  woods ;  and  on 
his  return  he  would  bring  with  him  a  lard- 
pail  full  of  the  tender,  slippery,  fragrant 
inner  lining  of  the  bark  of  pine  trees,  locally 
known  as  "slyver."  This  was  always  seized 
with  delighted  acclaim  by  the  entire  family 
and  wolfed  down  greedily  because  of  its  de- 
licious piney  taste.  The  Hayden  mango  has 
the  same  piney  taste  raised  to  the  thirty- 
third  or  master's  degree.  One  Hayden 
mango  makes  an  ample  dessert  for  two 
people ;  and  I  have  not  found  that  the  Miam- 
ians  are  averse  to  selling  them,  or  that  the 
prices  are  as  high  as  the  catalogues  claim. 
Packages  of  six  Hayden  mangoes  have  been 


160  SUN  HUNTING 

sent  to  me  repeatedly  from  Miami  by  parcel 
post  at  three  dollars  a  half  dozen. 

The  Miami  catalogues  are  a  trifle  wild 
when  they  start  raving  about  the  exquisite 
joy  of  eating  a  mango  that  costs  a  dollar  and 
a  half;  but  if  one  can  get  a  good  Hayden 
mango  for  half  a  dollar,  it  will  probably 
strike  him  as  being  considerably  better  than 
such  ordinary  matters  as  oatmeal  gruel, 
baked  beans,  suet  pudding,  griddle  cakes, 
fried  bananas,  bread  pudding,  or  a  poke  in 
the  eye  with  a  pointed  stick. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

OF    THE    EVERGLADES     AND    OF    THE    TWO    SEASONS 

OBTAINING    IN    THAT  DAMP   LOCALITY — AND 

OF    GRASS,    FANCY    AND    OTHERWISE 

OFF  to  the  west  of  Miami  lie  the  Ever- 
glades, first  made  famous  by  the  Seminole 
War,  when  the  United  States  Army  spent 
upward  of  fifteen  years  trying  to  chase  the 
Seminoles  out  of  the  Everglades  but  seldom 
saw  more  than  three  Seminoles  at  one  time. 
The  Everglades,  not  so  long  ago,  was  an 
enormous  shallow  lake  eight  thousand 
square  miles  in  area,  dotted  with  half-sub- 
merged islands  out  of  which  grew  giant 
whiskered  live  oaks  and  countless  varieties 
of  tropical  plants.  The  alligator  basked  in 
its  shadowed  streams;  and  the  graceful 
panther  lurked  among  the  undergrowth, 
constantly  ready  to  emit  a  bloodcurdling 
scream  calculated  to  make  the  hardiest  in- 
161 


162  SUN  HUNTING 

truder  think  longingly  of  home  and  mother. 
Exploration  was  made  almost  impossible  by 
a  saw-toothed  grass  which  grew  through- 
out the  Everglades  and  extended  several 
feet  above  the  water,  so  that  the  person  who 
tried  to  force  his  way  through  it  would  cut 
everything  to  shreds  up  to  and  including  his 
eyebrows.  People  talked  for  years  of  drain- 
ing the  Everglades ;  but  such  talk  was  usually 
received  with  screams  of  laughter  that  ri- 
valed the  yells  of  the  Everglades  panthers. 
Several  years  ago  the  State  of  Florida 
settled  down  in  earnest  to  the  systematic 
draining  of  the  Everglades.  Canals  were 
cut,  giant  locks  were  installed  to  control  the 
water  level,  and  the  land  was  cleared. 
Thousands  of  acres  are  being  reclaimed  each 
year,  settlers  are  moving  in  constantly,  and 
the  reclaimed  land  is  yielding  vegetables  and 
fruits  of  a  size  and  quality  to  make  a  Maine 
farmer  shake  his  head  dubiously  and  won- 
der whether  that  last  batch  of  licker  that  the 
sheriff  sent  him  had  affected  his  eyes.  The 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          163 

soil  is  a  rich  black  muck  which  has  resulted 
from  centuries  of  decaying  vegetation;  and 
anything  that  will  grow  will  grow  about 
twice  as  large  and  twice  as  rapidly  in  the 
Everglades  as  it  will  anywhere  else.  There 
used  to  be  only  two  seasons  in  the  Ever- 
glades— wet  and  wetter ;  but  now  there  is  a 
dry  season;  and  in  the  course  of  a  few 
years,  when  the  fruit-trees  begin  to  bear,  the 
Everglades  alone  will  be  in  a  position  to  sup- 
ply every  northern  city  throughout  the  win- 
ter with  all  the  newfangled  and  oldfangled 
fruits  and  vegetables  that  can  be  desired. 

The  thousands  of  farmers  who  have 
retired  from  active  farming  and  are  occupy- 
ing their  winters  by  absorbing  the  sun  in 
Miami  and  pitching  horseshoes  in  Royal 
Palm  Park  become  fearfully  excited  over 
the  various  varieties  of  grass  that  are  raised 
in  the  Everglade  lands.  Grass  is  not  a 
thing  that  one  would  expect  to  mention  at 
any  length  in  a  casual  dissertation  on  a  win- 
ter resort;  but  the  excessive  wonderment 


164  SUN  HUNTING 

over  it  on  the  part  of  the  horseshoe  pitchers 
requires  some  mention  of  grass.  It  appears 
that  some  of  the  grasses  that  have  come  in 
thick  enough  to  get  themselves  talked  about 
are  Para,  Bermuda,  Rhodes,  Natal,  Sudan, 
St.  Lucia,  St.  Augustine,  Napier,  Broom, 
sage,  Guatemalan,  panicum,  crab  grass, 
maiden  cane,  Billion  Dollar  grass  and  several 
others.  There  seems  to  be  everything  but 
just  plain  grass.  The  chief  idea  of  the  farm- 
ers seems  to  be  that  with  all  this  grass,  the 
Florida  stock  raisers  can  have  evergreen  pas- 
turage, and  cattle  can  be  fed  on  about  a  third 
of  the  space  that  they  need  in  the  North. 

This,  of  course,  is  important  if  true;  but 
the  average  person  who  comes  to  Miami  is 
not  interested  in  grass  except  as  something 
on  which  to  play  golf  or  sit.  What  he  wants 
is  usually  holiday  relaxation  and  plenty  of 
it;  and  if  that's  what  he  wants,  he  can  get 
so  much  of  it  in  and  near  Miami  that  one 
week  of  complete  relaxation  must  usually 
be  followed  by  two  weeks  of  recuperation. 


CHAPTER  IX 

OF  THE  OLD  MIAMI  AND  THE  NEW  MIAMI — OF  DIF- 
FERENCES    BETWEEN     MIAMI     BEACH     AND     PALM 
BEACH OF  THE  SCENIC  POSSIBILITIES  IN  FLOAT- 
ING COCONUTS  AND  THE  ACTIVITIES  OF 
JOHN  S.  COLLINS 

THE  people  who  knew  Miami  prior  to  1918 
have  in  their  minds  an  entirely  different 
place  from  the  Miami  of  to-day.  The  old 
Miami  was  a  city  first  and  a  winter  resort 
afterward.  This  statement  will,  of  course, 
offend  the  touchy  Miami  folk;  but  it  is  true 
none  the  less.  It  was — and  is — a  hustling, 
bustling,  booming,  noisy  city  with  about  one 
automobile  for  each  seven-eighths  of  an 
inhabitant,  and  with  perpetual  warmth  and 
sunshine.  In  the  long  run,  however,  the  big- 
money  tourists  don't  want  to  go  to  a  hust- 
ling, bustling,  rapidly  growing  city  for 
their  winter  holidays,  even  though  the  city 
may  boast  perpetual  warmth  and  sunshine. 

165 


i66  SUN  HUNTING 

What  they  want  is  clean  air  and  plenty  of 
sun  and  sky,  and  a  complete  change  from 
the  scenery  to  which  they  are  accustomed 
in  their  northern  cities,  and  a  surcease  from 
all  noises  except  the  noises  they  make  them- 
selves— which  are  frequently  much  louder 
than  the  ordinary  noises  of  a  city.  For  that 
reason  Palm  Beach  was  in  a  class  by  itself. 
The  big-money  tourists  went  to  Palm  Beach. 
Miami  got  a  smattering  of  them,  but  a  very 
small  smattering.  Palm  Beach  sneered  at 
Miami  Beach  and  called  it  "the  Coney 
Island  of  Florida." 

That,  however,  was  prior  to  1918.  To- 
day Miami  has  been  augmented  by  Miami 
Beach;  and  eventually  Miami  Beach  will 
nose  out  ahead  of  Palm  Beach  and  get  all 
the  youngsters  and  live  wires  who  like  to  be 
on  the  jump  from  eight  in  the  morning  until 
three  and  four  and  five  o'clock  the  next 
morning — with  occasional  busy  evenings 
which  will  keep  them  up  until  six  or  seven 
in  the  morning.  Palm  Beach  folk  still  sneer 


Any  January  morning  at  Miami  Beach. 


A  January  afternoon  tea-dance  on  the  shore  of  Biscayne  Bay. 


TROPICAL  GROWTH  167 

at  Miami  Beach  and  still,  according  to  their 
ancient  custom,  call  it  the  Coney  Island 
of  Florida.  But  it  isn't  the  Coney  Island  of 
Florida;  and  Palm  Beach  is  frightened  for 
the  first  time  in  years — frightened  that  the 
wealthy  tourists  will  desert  the  endless  cor- 
ridors of  her  hotels  and  the  continuous 
clothes-changing  and  the  eternal  chatter  and 
twaddle  of  society  and  near-society  and  the 
lifeless  air  of  Bradley's  Roulette  Emporium, 
and  get  down  to  Miami,  where  there's 
something  doing  every  minute,  and  where 
people  go  into  dinner  in  golf  clothes  without 
getting  a  hard  look  from  the  head  waiter. 

The  story  of  Miami  Beach  is  a  remark- 
able one  and  without  it  Miami  would  scarcely 
be  able  to  get  out  gaudy  prospectuses  with 
pictures  of  beautifully  shaped  ladies  in  red 
one-piece  bathing  suits  on  the  covers.  This 
is  the  way  of  it: 

Miami's  palm-shaded  streets  run  down  to 
the  shores  of  Biscayne  Bay,  which  is  a 
strip  of  water  some  seven  miles  long  and 


1 68  SUN  HUNTING 

between  two  and  three  miles  wide.  Between 
the  bay  and  the  ocean  is  a  long  narrow 
tongue  of  land,  not  much  over  a  mile  in 
width  at  its  widest  point.  Prior  to  1913, 
ninety-nine  per  cent,  of  this  narrow  tongue 
of  land  was  a  worthless  jungle.  The  man 
who  owned  it  is  said  to  have  bought  it  for 
twelve  thousand  dollars.  The  only  way  of 
reaching  it  was  by  ferry  boat,  and  there  was 
nothing  on  it  in  the  line  of  a  winter  resort 
except  a  bathing  shack  on  the  beach  at  the 
extreme  tip,  to  which  a  few  tourists  occasion- 
ally repaired  when  the  urge  for  sea  bathing 
became  almost  too  intense  to  be  endured. 

A  persistent  attempt  had  been  made  to 
utilize  the  natural  advantages  of  this  narrow 
tongue  of  sand  and  jungle.  In  1884  some 
New  Jersey  business  men  essayed  to  plant 
coconuts  on  it  in  sufficient  quantities  to 
make  the  venture  profitable.  There  were 
no  railroads,  and  it  could  only  be  reached  by 
boat.  Three  shiploads  of  coconuts  were 
brought  from  the  island  of  Trinidad.  The 


TROPICAL  GROWTH  169 

ships  were  anchored  off  the  tongue  of  land; 
and  when  the  wind  blew  toward  the  shore, 
the  coconuts  were  dumped  overboard  to  float 
to  land.  Three  hundred  and  thirty-four 
thousand  coconuts  were  sent  ashore  by  the 
promoters  of  this  scheme.  They  cost  five 
cents  apiece  in  Trinidad,  and  the  freight 
figured  up  to  six  cents  apiece.  The  venture 
became  so  costly  that  the  promoters  hunted 
around  for  more  capital  and  succeeded  in  in- 
teresting a  New  Jersey  fruit-grower  named 
John  S.  Collins.  As  a  commercial  proposi- 
tion, the  coconut  planting  was  a  complete 
failure.  But  as  a  flyer  in  landscape  archi- 
tecture, it  was  a  great  success;  for  the  en- 
tire ocean-front  of  the  tongue  of  land  was 
fringed  with  beautiful  coconut  palms. 

The  original  coconut  planters  dropped  out 
as  their  failure  became  apparent.  Collins 
and  one  other  man  hung  on  to  their  narrow 
and  apparently  worthless  piece  of  land.  In 
the  center  of  it  was  some  high  ground  on 
which  Collins  conceived  the  idea  of  starting 


170  SUN  HUNTING 

a  grove  of  avocados,  better  known  as  alli- 
gator pears.  The  avocado  shuns  frost  as  an 
Epworth  Leaguer  shuns  cocktails ;  and  since 
there  is  no  frost  worthy  of  the  name  on  the 
tongue  of  land  because  of  its  water-protec- 
tion on  both  sides,  Collins  figured  that 
avocado  culture  could  be  made  to  pay.  He 
was  right;  and  his  avocado  grove  is  now 
the  largest  in  the  world.  The  speed  with 
which  he  worked,  however,  didn't  meet  the 
approval  of  his  one  remaining  partner;  so 
Collins  bought  him  out,  becoming  the  sole 
owner  of  the  narrow  sand-spit  with  the 
avocado  grove  down  its  backbone. 

It  then  began  to  dawn  on  Collins,  who  was 
seventy-four  years  old  and  therefore  able  to 
see  a  good  many  things  that  younger  men 
overlooked,  that  his  sand-spit  was  a  pleasant 
place  on  which  to  live  during  the  winter  and 
summer  too,  but  that  he  probably  couldn't 
persuade  people  to  live  there  until  he  made 
it  possible  for  people  to  get  there.  Conse- 
quently he  conceived  the  idea  of  building  a 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          171 

wooden  bridge  two  and  one-half  miles  in 
length — the  longest  vehicle  bridge  in  the 
world — between  Miami  and  the  sand-spit. 

The  bridge  was  started  in  July,  1912;  and, 
as  has  always  been  customary  in  the  early  de- 
velopments of  Florida,  his  friends,  attorneys 
and  bankers  almost  had  heart-failure  over 
his  wild  scheme.  They  prophesied  enthusias- 
tically that  in  about  two  years'  time  he  would 
be  standing  at  the  Miami  end  of  his  unfin- 
ished bridge,  begging  for  nickels  with  which 
to  get  a  square  meal.  The  population  of 
Miami  at  that  time  was  about  seven  thou- 
sand five  hundred. 

At  one  time,  late  in  1912,  the  amateur 
prophets  were  looking  gloomily  at  Collins 
and  saying  proudly  to  each  other :  "Well,  I 
told  him  so!"  The  bridge  was  such  a  tre- 
mendous undertaking  that  the  Collins  money 
began  to  pinch  out ;  and  no  local  talent  could 
be  found  to  advance  any  sum  larger  than 
nine  dollars  on  the  chance  of  making  a  suc- 
cess out  of  the  bridge  or  the  sand-spit. 


CHAPTER  X 

OF  THE  ARRIVAL  OF  CARL  FISHER  IN   MIAMI — OF 
FISHER'S   FEVERISH    IMAGINATION   AND   VIOLENT 

DREAMS OF  THE  DESPAIR  OF  FISHER'S  FRIENDS 

AND  OF  THE  EVOLUTION  OF  A  JUNGLE 

EARLY  in  1913  a  wealthy  Indianapolis 
business  man  named  Carl  G.  Fisher  came  to 
Miami  for  his  health.  Fisher,  from  the 
days  when  he  used  to  be  a  news  butcher  on 
Indiana  trains,  was  able  to  see  the  possibili- 
ties in  things  which  every  one  else  regarded 
as  impossibilities.  He  had  always  plunged 
heavily  on  his  beliefs  while  his  friends  and 
acquaintances  stood  on  the  side-lines  and 
told  one  another  what  a  shame  it  was  that 
Carl  had  gone  bugs.  One  of  his  plunges  had 
been  the  big  Indianapolis  Speedway — a  gi- 
gantic structure  which  does  all  its  business, 
pays  its  expenses  and  makes  its  profits  on 
one  day  out  of  the  year. 

Collins,  unable  to  complete  his  bridge 
172 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          173 

alone,  went  to  Fisher  and  asked  him  for  as- 
sistance. Fisher,  with  his  ever-present  will- 
ingness to  take  a  chance,  supplied  Collins 
with  the  necessary  funds  to  finish  the  job, 
taking  in  return  a  large  and  unprepossessing 
slice  of  the  long,  narrow,  jungle-grown  sand- 
spit  that  shut  Miami  off  from  the  sea.  He 
immediately  began  to  take  a  passionate  in- 
terest in  that  desolate  piece  of  real  estate.  In 
his  feverish  mind's  eye  he  saw  it  covered 
with  the  greatest  winter  resort  of  modern 
times — with  acres  of  beautiful  homes,  and 
hotels  bowered  in  towering  palms  and  scar- 
let-flowered hibiscus;  with  polo  fields  and 
golf  links  and  tennis  courts  and  ice-rinks: 
with  lagoons  and  canals  and  artificial  islands 
and  Venetian  gondolas:  with  casinos  and 
bath-houses  and  outdoor  swimming  pools 
that  would  outdo  anything  in  America  or 
Europe. 

He  let  himself  go  with  the  utmost  en- 
thusiasm, and  kept  his  imagination  working 
on  a  twenty-two-hour  day.  His  friends 


174  SUN  HUNTING 

gave  up  all  hope  for  him.  "Poor  Fisher!" 
they  murmured  privately  behind  his  back. 
"Poor  Fisher  has  gone  completely  loco.  We 
must  make  arrangements  to  put  him  away 
quietly." 

After  he  had  dreamed  a  few  of  his  more 
violent  dreams,  he  went  out  to  the  sand-spit 
to  look  it  over  more  carefully  and  decide 
definitely  where  to  put  a  few  of  the  hotels 
and  casinos.  Around  its  shores  he  found 
a  solid  wall  of  mangroves  whose  interlaced 
roots  rose  several  feet  out  of  the  water  in 
such  a  confused  and  slimy  jumble  that  any 
appreciable  progress  through  them  was  a 
matter  of  hours.  So  he  got  a  gang  of 
twelve  negroes  and  set  them  to  work  hack- 
ing a  hole  all  the  way  through  this  jungle. 
Beyond  the  mangrove  swamp  was  a  solidly 
interlaced  growth  of  cabbage  palms  and 
palmettos  through  which  no  human  being 
could  force  a  passage  without  tearing  his 
clothes  and  his  skin  to  shreds.  The  palm 
and  palmetto  growth  filled  every  part  of 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          175 

his   property   except   the    shores — and   the 
shores  were  overgrown  with  mangroves. 

Greatly  cheered  and  stimulated  by  these 
obstacles,  he  promptly  set  to  work  on  his 
scheme  to  build,  almost  overnight,  Ameri- 
ca's greatest  winter  resort.  Starting  at  the 
extreme  tip  of  the  tongue,  his  gangs  of 
laborers  cleared  off  the  mangroves,  cabbage 
palms,  palmettos  and  other  scrub.  They 
found  bear  in  it,  and  panther  and  countless 
numbers  of  smaller  animals,  and  quail  by 
the  thousands.  Then  along  the  edges  of  the 
tongue  they  built  high  cement  bulkheads. 
As  the  bulkheads  were  finished,  dredgers 
pumped  sand  and  water  out  of  Biscayne  Bay 
and  inside  the  bulkheads.  The  water  ran 
off,  but  the  sand  remained  and  turned  the 
swamps  and  marshes  into  solid  land.  This 
work  required  dredging  crews  of  one  hun- 
dred and  fifty  men,  three  pumping  boats, 
two  digging  boats,  from  ten  to  fifteen 
barges,  five  supply  boats,  two  oil  tugs,  two 
anchor  boats  and  an  eighteen-inch  pipe  line 


176  SUN  HUNTING 

over  a  mile  in  length.  For  eight  months  the 
pay  roll  was  four  thousand  dollars  a  day, 
and  Fisher's  friends  daily  became  more  in- 
sistent that  he  be  locked  up  where  he  could 
no  longer  throw  his  money  into  the  Atlantic 
Ocean. 

Canals  and  inland  waterways  were  dug 
so  that  future  residents  might  have  easy 
access  to  all  portions  of  the  resort  by  yacht, 
house-boat  and  motor-boat.  Palms,  hibiscus 
and  tropical  plants  and  vines  slowly  crept 
along  in  the  rear  of  the  dredging  operations. 
Fifty  acres  were  turned  into  polo  fields. 
Three  hundred  and  twenty-five  acres  were 
set  aside  for  golf  courses.  Three  excellent 
golf  courses  were  made,  two  at  a  cost  of 
two  hundred  thousand  dollars  apiece,  and 
one  at  a  cost  of  a  quarter  million. 

To-day,  the  tongue  of  land  that  was  an 
impenetrable  jungle  in  1913  and  a  waste  of 
sand  in  1917,  has  become  the  city  of  Miami 
Beach.  Its  value  has  grown  from  twelve 
thousand  to  twenty  million.  There  may  be 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          177 

some  to  question  the  latter  figure;  but  the 
accessed  value  of  Miami  Beach  property  in 
1921  was  $5,540,112;  and  unimproved 
property  was  being  assessed  at  one-quarter 
of  its  valuation,  while  improved  property 
was  being  assessed  at  one-tenth  of  its  valua- 
tion. It  has  a  frontage  of  six  miles  on  the 
ocean,  seven  miles  on  Biscayne  Bay,  and 
sixteen  miles  on  inland  waterways  and 
canals — though  a  Miami  Beach  enthusiast 
would  no  more  think  of  listing  Miami  Beach 
property  in  miles  than  a  jeweler  would  think 
of  listing  diamonds  in  quarts.  It  is  too  prec- 
ious. He  lists  it  in  feet,  and  tells  you  that 
the  frontage  on  inland  waterways  is  eighty- 
five  thousand  feet.  In  a  few  years,  if  he 
progresses  in  the  future  as  he  has  in  the 
past,  he'll  probably  be  listing  it  in  inches. 


CHAPTER  XI 

OF  EXPENSIVE   EXPENSES   AND    HEATED    ICE-RINKS — 

OF    LILY   ON    LILY   THAT    O'ERPLACE    THE    SEA 

AND  OF  THE  BONEHEADEDNESS  OF  MOST  OF 
THE  HUMAN  RACE 

IN  1913  Miami  Beach  was  an  impene- 
trable jungle  on  a  sand-spit  and  a  swamp. 
In  1922  many  a  water-front  lot  was  being 
sold  for  double  the  price  that  was  paid  for 
the  original  jungle  not  so  many  years  ago. 

In  place  of  the  sand  and  the  swamp  and 
the  jungle  there  are  over  forty  miles  of 
street  and  roads,  lined  with  palms  and 
shrubs.  Several  hotels  have  been  built,  the 
largest  of  which — the  Flamingo — looks  ex- 
actly like  a  grain  elevator  and  has  the  reputa- 
tion of  being  the  most  expensive  winter 
resort  hotel  in  the  world.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  it  is  no  more  expensive  than  the  big 
Palm  Beach  hotels — although  that  is  suffi- 
ciently expensive  to  send  the  cold  shivers 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          179 

up  and  down  the  spine  of  the  person  who 
hasn't  become  thoroughly  hardened  to 
money-spending.  Two  people  can  have  a 
nice  room  with  bath  and  all  the  food  they 
want — in  reason — for  forty  dollars  a  day. 
They  can  also  have  free  oranges,  which 
somehow  seems  to  remove  some  of  the 
numbing  pain  from  the  impact  of  the  bill 
against  the  brain.  There  is  no  particular 
reason  why  it  should,  as  one  can  easily 
drown  himself  in  the  juice  from  a  dollar's 
worth  of  oranges. 

There  are  a  score  and  more  of  apart- 
ment-houses, and  three  hundred  and  fifty 
private  residences  ranging  from  uncon- 
sciously simple  little  ten-thousand-dollar 
bungalows  up  to  artfully  simple  little  two- 
hundred-thousand-dollar  cottages. 

Within  another  six  years,  according  to 
the  more  sane  and  conservative  Miami 
Beach  predicters,  there  will  be  six  or  seven 
more  hotels  at  Miami  Beach,  all  larger  than 
the  Flamingo.  Fisher  has  another  modest 


i8o  SUN  HUNTING 

caravansary  planned  which  is  to  have  an  ice- 
rink, covered  tennis  courts  and  a  tanbark 
horse-show  enclosure  on  the  roof.  Unless 
his  friends  lock  him  up,  he  is  sure  to  carry 
out  his  plans — which  will  probably  be  as 
highly  successful  as  his  past  ventures. 

A  few  of  his  friends  no  longer  fear  for 
his  sanity.  His  former  business  partner  in 
Indianapolis,  James  A.  Allison,  has  even 
helped  the  good  work  along  by  building  and 
stocking  at  Miami  Beach  an  aquarium  that 
rivals  the  great  aquariums  of  Monaco, 
Naples,  Honolulu  and  Manila.  A  great 
many  of  his  friends,  however,  still  shake 
their  heads  pityingly  when  they  hear  men- 
tion of  hotels  with  ice-rinks  on  the  roof. 

The  dredging  operations  which  had  trans- 
ferred sand  from  the  bottom  of  Biscayne 
Bay  to  the  top  of  Miami  Beach  had  left  sev- 
eral unsightly  mud  banks  protruding  a  few 
inches  from  the  surface  of  the  bay.  Fisher 
surrounded  these  mud  banks  with  bulk- 
heads and  pumped  more  mud  into  them. 


TROPICAL  GROWTH  181 

The  result  was  seven  beautiful  islands,  most 
of  which  are  already  shaded  by  palm  groves 
and  dotted  with  simple  but  beautiful  homes 
costing  about  thirty  dollars  a  square  incn. 
They  are  easy  of  access,  since  they  are  con- 
nected with  the  mainland  or  the  causeway. 
Some  Miami  people  have  likened  these 
islands  to  lilies  which  o'erlace  the  sea,  after 
the  fashion  of  Senator  Lodge  quoting  from 
Browning  in  an  attempt  to  explain  the 
islands  of  the  Pacific  to  a  concourse  of 
hard-boiled  hearers;  but  Palm  Beach  folk, 
with  that  peculiar  jealousy  evinced  by  the 
residents  of  one  Florida  resort  toward 
everything  in  a  rival  Florida  resort,  say  that 
they  look  more  like  floating  flapjacks.  The 
truth,  of  course,  lies  between ;  and  when  they 
are  covered  with  masses  of  tropical  foliage, 
there  will  be  nothing  flapjackish  about  them. 
One  of  the  islands,  together  with  an  obelisk 
rising  from  its  center,  was  constructed  as 
a  memorial  to  Henry  M.  Flagler,  without 
whose  vision  and  foresight  Florida  would 


182  SUN  HUNTING 

probably  only  be  known  as  the  place  that 
Florida  Water  was  named  after.  One  of 
the  largest  islands  has  an  area  of  sixty 
acres.  A  mile  of  bulkhead,  with  bulkhead- 
ing  at  twelve  dollars  a  foot,  was  necessary 
in  its  construction,  and  its  total  cost  was 
half  a  million  dollars. 

The  inability  of  ninety  per  cent,  of  the 
human  race  to  see  how  a  thing  is  going  to 
look  when  finished  has  cost  the  human  race 
a  large  amount  of  money  at  Miami  Beach. 
Not  long  ago,  for  example,  an  effort  was 
made  to  sell  a  new  house  for  sixteen  thou- 
sand dollars.  It  stood  on  new  flat  land, 
however,  and  there  were  no  trees  or  shrubs 
around  it.  Everybody  who  saw  it  refused 
to  buy  it;  so  three  thousand  five  hundred 
dollars  was  spent  in  planting  grass,  palms 
and  flowers  and  adding  walks  and  a  boat- 
house.  When  this  had  been  done,  the  house 
sold  instantly  for  thirty  thousand  dollars 
to  one  of  the  men  who  had  refused  to  pay 
sixteen  thousand  for  it  the  preceding  year. 


CHAPTER  XII 

OF  ONE-PIECE  AND  TWO-FIFTHS-PIECE  BATHING  SUITS 

OF  THE  HONORABLE  WILLIAM   JENNINGS  BRYAN 

AND  HIS  ACTIVITIES — OF  BOOTLEGGERS OF  THE 

SANCTIMONIOUS    HAIG   AND    HAIG   BOYS — AND 
OF    RUM    IN    GENERAL, 

MIAMI  and  Miami  Beach  are  now  con- 
nected by  a  curving  concrete  causeway 
three  and  a  half  miles  long.  New  and 
spacious  as  it  is,  it  is  often  too  small  to 
accommodate  the  thousands  of  automobiles 
that  hasten  out  to  Miami  Beach  on  hot 
Sunday  afternoons  in  mid-winter  in  order 
that  their  occupants  may  obtain  an  eyeful, 
as  the  saying  goes,  of  the  bathing  crowds. 
CThe  prudish  element  hasn't  yet  been  able  to 
make  its  influence  felt  at  Miami  Beach  to 
any  noticeable  extent.  The  one-piece  bath- 
ing suit  is  heavily  displayed  by  engaging 
young  women,  and  there  are  also  large  num- 
bers of  bathing  suits  which  appear  to  be 

183 


184  SUN  HUNTING 

one-half-piece  or  even  two-fifths-piece. 
The  latter  variety  of  bathing  suit  is  never 
worn  with  stockings;  for  no  stockings — so 
far  as  is  known — have  yet  been  made  long 
enough  to  reach  to  the  hips.  A  striking 
effect  is  frequently  obtained  by  the  wearers 
of  these  two-fifths-piece  bathing  suits 
when  they  stroll  out  on  the  beach  in  short, 
hip-length  capes  which  hang  open  negli- 
gently at  the  throat.  One  sees  nothing 
below  the  cape  but  several  square  yards  of 
flesh,  and  nothing  above  the  cape  but  several 
square  feet  of  flesh.  It  is  a  sight  that  gives 
one  pause.  When  one  sees  it  for  the  first 
time,  he  feels  that  he  ought  to  hunt  up  a 
life-saver  sometime  later  in  the  day  and  ask 
him  to  go  and  speak  to  the  young  woman  and 
tell  her  that  she  has  come  out  without  her 
two-fifths-piece  bathing  suit.  But  one  soon 
becomes  accustomed  to  seeing  such  things — • 
so  accustomed,  in  fact,  that  one  feels  disap- 
pointed if  he  doesn't  see  them. 
The  Honorable  William  Jennings  Bryan 


- 


The  site  of  the  Flamingo  Hotel,  Miami  Beach   (at  top)  in  1912; 
(in  middle)  in  1917;  and  (at  bottom)  in  1922. 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          185 

has  a  home  in  Miami,  and  was  devoting 
most  of  his  time  during  the  winter  of  1922 
to  assuring  his  large  and  enthusiastic  au- 
diences that  the  doctrine  of  evolution, 
hitherto  accepted  as  proved  by  every 
reputable  scientist  because  of  the  over- 
whelming mass  of  supporting  evidence,  is 
no  more  worthy  of  credence  than  the  story 
of  Cinderella  and  the  little  Glass  Slipper; 
that,  in  fact,  it  is  as  harmful  to  the  young 
and  impressionable  as  an  unexpurgated 
set  of  Burton's  Arabian  Nights.  The 
citizens  of  Miami  Beach  were  highly  de- 
lighted with  Mr.  Bryan's  anti-evolution 
activities — not  because  they  have  anything 
against  evolution,  but  because  they  like  to 
see  Mr.  Bryan  interested  in  something  that 
will  keep  him  from  trying  to  make  his  neigh- 
bors conform  to  his  ideas  of  right,  and,  by 
so  doing,  spoiling  the  bathing-hour.  In 
fact,  a  committee  of  Miami  Beachers  was 
thinking  of  waiting  on  Mr.  Bryan  when  he 
had  finished  shooting  holes  in  Darwin,  Hux- 


186  SUN  HUNTING 

ley,  Wallace,  Herbert  Spencer  and  other  dis- 
tinguished scientists,  and  urging  him  to  at- 
tack the  disgusting  and  contemptible  theory 
that  the  earth  is  a  globe  or  sphere,  and  to 
come  out  strong  for  a  flat  earth. 

There  are  no  wheel-chairs  in  Miami 
Beach,  as  there  are  in  Palm  Beach.  The 
hotels  tried  to  interest  their  guests  in  wheel- 
chairs, but  the  guests  would  have  none  of 
them.  They  are  successful  at  Palm  Beach 
because  the  Palm  Beachers  find  them  useful 
things  in  which  to  kill  time.  But  at  Miami 
Beach  one  has  no  time  for  time-killing. 
There  is  something  doing  every  minute. 
There  is  golf  and  tennis  and  polo  and  bath- 
ing and  dancing  and  seeing  the  bootlegger, 
or  rushing  over  to  town  to  see  a  movie  or 
an  orange  grove  or  another  bootlegger  or 
something,  and  if  one  tried  to  get  around  in 
a  wheel-chair,  he'd  come  down  with  nervous 
prostration  in  a  couple  of  days. 

The  bootleggers  are  very  active  in  Miami ; 
and  the  Miami  bootlegger  is  a  very  superior 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          187 

sort  of  bootlegger.  He  comes  around  to  his 
patrons  each  day  with  long  lists  of  wet 
goods  and  the  prices,  and  gives  the  names  of 
prominent  bankers  as  references  for  his  re- 
liability. The  prices  seem  pleasingly  low  to 
northerners  who  have  been  paying  one  hun- 
dred and  twenty  dollars  a  case  for  stuff  that 
is  only  fit  for  cleaning  the  nicotine  out  of 
pipe  stems.  The  bootleggers  get  their  wares 
in  Bimini,  which  is  a  small  island  only  a  few 
miles  off  the  Florida  coast.  It  is  a  British 
island,  but  the  British  officials  evidently 
haven't  any  idea  of  assisting  the  United 
States  to  enforce  her  laws.  One  of  the 
leading  Scotch  distillers  stated  contempt- 
uously when  I  was  in  Scotland  a  little  over  a 
year  ago  that  it  would  allow  none  of  its  pro- 
duct to  be  sold  to  a  nation  of  hypocrites — 
meaning  America.  A  good  percentage  of 
the  stuff  in  Bimini,  however,  is  Haig  & 
Haig,  and  it  was  the  Haig  &  Haig  people 
that  made  the  pleasant  observation  about  the 
nation  of  hypocrites. 


188  SUN  HUNTING 

The  past  record  of  all  distillers  has  proved 
conclusively  that  they  would  sell  to  anybody 
that  had  the  price — hypocrite,  murderer, 
wife-beater,  "degenerate  or  sot;  and  Haig  & 
Haig  are  no  better  than  the  rest  of  them. 

All  this  Haig  &  Haig  comes  over  to  Flor- 
ida, where  it  is  not  esteemed  very  highly 
because  it  was  apparently  turned  out  of  the 
distillery  in  a  hurry  for  the  American  trade. 
The  Miami  bootleggers  recommend  Lawson 
Scotch  to  their  friends  rather  than  Haig  & 
Haig,  for  they  say  that  the  Haig  &  Haig  is 
too  green — whatever  that  means.  The  uni- 
versal bootlegging  price  for  Scotch  whisky 
in  Miami  is  fifty  dollars  a  case.*  The  boot- 
leggers buy  it  for  twenty- four  dollars  a  case 
in  Bimini.  The  taxicab  men  at  the  big 
hotels  retail  the  stuff  to  the  hotel  guests  at 
ten  dollars  a  bottle  or  one  hundred  and 
twenty  dollars  a  case,  which  makes  a  very 
nice  profit  for  them.  Gin  can  be  bought — 
from  the  bootleggers,  not  from  the  taxicab 


*February,  1922,  quotations. 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          189 

agents — for  thirty  dollars  and  forty  dollars 
a  case;  while  the  most  expensive  liquid  re- 
freshment is  absinthe,  which  comes  as  high 
as  sixty-five  dollars  a  case. 

Tourists  who  plan  to  bring  back  a  wee 
nip  of  Scotch  with  them  from  Florida  should 
be  very  careful  to  carry  the  bottles  in  their 
hand  luggage.  Many  trunks  are  opened  on 
the  way  up,  evidently  by  members  of  the  train 
crews,  and  all  alcoholic  stimulants  carefully 
abstracted.  Nothing  else  is  touched.  A 
friend  of  mine  took  three  metal  hot-water 
bottles  to  Florida  with  him  so  that  he  could 
bring  Scotch  back  in  them.  These  bottles 
were  encased  in  pretty  pink  flannel  wrap- 
pers. He  filled  them  with  Scotch  as 
planned;  but  when  he  reached  Washington 
again,  he  found  that  his  trunk  had  been 
opened  and  the  bottles  removed.  The  pink 
flannel  wrappers  were  left  behind,  and 
nothing  else  had  been  touched. 

There  seems  to  be  an  idea  in  the  North 
that  rum-running  from  Bimini  and  Cuba  to 


igo  SUN  HUNTING 

the  Florida  coast  can  be  easily  stopped  by 
Prohibition  agents.  This  is  a  mistaken 
idea;  for  the  rum-runner  has  several  hun- 
dred miles  of  uninhabited  coastline  and 
keys  on  which  to  land  his  cargo.  It  was 
among  these  keys  that  the  most  notorious 
pirates  of  the  early  days  concealed  their 
vessels  and  their  treasure,  and  eluded  pur- 
suit for  years.  It  would  be  as  easy  to  catch 
a  rum-runner  among  the  Florida  keys  as  to 
locate  a  red  ant  in  the  Hippodrome. 

Any  Prohibition  enforcement  agent  that 
didn't  have  lead  in  his  shoes  and  a  daub  of 
mud  in  both  eyes,  however,  could  easily  get 
the  goods  on  twenty  or  thirty  Miami  boot- 
leggers in  a  day. 

One  good  result  of  comparatively  cheap 
whisky  in  Miami  is  the  apparently  total  dis- 
appearance of  beer-making  and  other  home- 
brewing  activities.  There  seems  to  be  no  mar- 
ket for  hops,  malt,  prunes,  raisins  or  wash- 
boilers — which  would  seem  to  make  Miami 
an  unusually  healthy  city  in  which  to  live. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

OF  FLORIDA  FISHING — OF  THE  TIGERISH    BARRACUDA 
AND    THE     SURPRISED-LOOKING     DOLPIN— OF    THE 
UNCONVENTIONAL     HABITS    OF    THE     WHIP-RAY 
AND  THE  VARYING  ESTIMATES  OF  CAP'N  CHAR- 
LEY   THOMPSON — AND    OF    THE    CONSERVA- 
TIVE RAVING  OF  THE  MIAMI  PROSPECTUSES 

THE  Florida  keys  drip  down  from  the  end 
of  the  peninsula  on  which  Miami  beach  is 
built,  and  would  doubtless  be  compared  by 
Senator  Lodge  or  the  late  Robert  Browning 
to  a  necklace  of  jade  and  gold,  or  to  mango 
on  mango  that  o'erlace  the  sea,  or  something 
similarly  poetic.  Among,  between  and 
around  these  keys  is  found  the  greatest 
fishing  in  the  world.  Florida  fishing  is 
about  as  much  like  the  ordinary  conception 
of  fishing  as  prize-fighting  is  like  fox-trot- 
ting. Instead  of  sitting  contemplatively  over 
a  rod  and  reel  with  a  pipe  in  his  mouth  and 
a  dreamy  look  in  his  eyes,  and  occasionally 
snaking  a  small  fish  out  of  the  water  in  a 
191 


192  SUN  HUNTING 

leisurely  manner,  the  Florida  fisherman 
crouches  over  his  rod  with  taut  muscles  and 
enters  knock-down  and  drag-out  fights 
with  bundles  of  concentrated  energy  that 
leave  him  as  sore  and  limp  and  blistered  as 
though  he  had  been  wrestling  with  the 
Twentieth  Century  Limited. 

Speedy  motor-boats  slip  away  from 
Miami  landing-stages  and  reach  the  fishing 
grounds  in  an  hour.  Over  the  reefs,  on 
whose  rocky  peaks  lie  the  skeletons  of  many 
an  ancient  wreck,  wait  the  barracuda,  some- 
times known  as  the  tigers  of  the  sea.  They 
are  long,  slim,  silvery  fish,  rather  like  enor- 
mous pickerel,  and  their  jaws  are  set  with 
heavy  dog-teeth.  They  average  between 
four  and  five  feet  in  length;  and  as  the 
fisherman  sits  in  the  stern  of  a  motor-boat 
with  his  bait  spinning  along  thirty  yards 
astern,  he  can  see  the  barracuda  following, 
following  along  behind  the  bait  like  a  thin 
gray  shadow.  The  barracuda  is  always 
there  and  always  hungry;  so  when  all  other 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          193 

game  fish  fail,  the  fishermen  turn  to  him. 
When  he  finally  decides  to  take  the  bait,  he 
takes  it  with  such  vigor  that  the  fisherman 
feels  that  a  steamer  trunk  has  fallen  on  the 
tip  of  his  rod.  The  rods  are  stiff  as  iron 
and  the  big  reels  have  drags  on  them  that 
would  stop  a  race-horse  in  a  hundred  yards ; 
so  the  average  barracuda  seldom  fights 
more  than  ten  minutes.  All  game  fish,  of 
course,  are  caught  by  trolling  from  the  back 
of  a  motor-boat  traveling  from  six  to  ten 
miles  an  hour. 

Out  a  little  farther  toward  the  gulf 
stream  are  the  golden  dolphins,  thin  and 
surprised-looking  fish,  much  smaller  than 
the  barracuda,  but  better  fighters.  There, 
too,  is  the  husky  amberjack,  that  fights  for 
twenty  minutes  and  more  in  spite  of  the 
heavy  drag  on  the  reel.  The  prettiest  wel- 
ter-weight fighter  of  the  Florida  waters  is 
the  sailfish,  a  blue  and  silver  torpedo,  five 
and  six  and  seven  feet  in  length,  with  a 
spear  for  a  nose  and  a  lateen  sail  for  a  dor- 


194  SUN  HUNTING 

sal  fin.  He  is  a  finicky  striker;  and  when 
he  is  at  the  bait  one  feels  only  a  slight  jar. 
The  lightness  of  the  touch  usually  means 
sailfish;  and  when  it  comes,  the  fisherman 
releases  his  drag  and  lets  his  line  run  out 
fifteen  or  twenty  or  even  thirty  feet.  Then 
he  snaps  the  drag  back  into  place  and  hoists 
his  rod  with  a  mighty  heave  without  further 
inquiry.  Frequently  the  sailfish  is  at  the 
end  of  the  line,  in  which  case  the  fun  begins 
— the  sensation  being  about  the  same  as 
holding  a  bucking  bronco  at  the  end  of  a 
fifty-yard  rope.  If  an  amateur  is  holding 
the  rod,  the  end  of  the  thirty  or  forty-five 
minute  fight  finds  him  calling  in  a  weak  and 
trembling  voice  for  a  large  drink  of  varnish 
or  some  similar  restorative,  and  he  spends 
the  remainder  of  the  trip  pricking  and 
caressing  the  blisters  on  his  hands. 

Farther  out  in  the  gulf  stream  are  the 
kings  of  the  heavy-weight  scrappers — tuna; 
while  between  the  keys  and  the  mainland 
are  the  giant  tarpon.  These  fish  will  fight 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          195 

for  two,  three  and  even  four  hours ;  and  if, 
in  their  leapings  to  shake  the  hooks  from 
their  mouths  they  chance  to  fall  in  the  boat, 
there  is  never  any  room  for  any  one  else. 

The  spectacles  that  one  sees  in  these  Flor- 
ida waters  are  enough -to  make  Izaak  Walton 
take  the  pledge. 

During  one  day's  fishing  which  I  had  off 
the  keys  with  President  James  Allison  of 
the  Miami  Aquarium  and  Cap'n  Charley 
Thompson,  champion  tarpon-tracker  of  Bis- 
cayne  Bay,  a  whip-ray  twenty  feet  from 
wing  to  wing  shot  thirty  feet  into  the  air 
just  ahead  of  our  boat,  falling  back  into  the 
water  with  a  crash  that  must  have  been 
heard  a  mile  in  every  direction.  Cap'n 
Thompson  declared  that  this  violent  leaping 
was  due  to  the  fact  that  the  whip-ray  fre- 
quently feeds  on  clams.  When  he  has 
gathered  a  bushel  of  clams  into  his  stomach, 
he  leaps  high  in  the  air  and  descends  on  his 
stomach.  The  resultant  crash  breaks  all  the 
clamshells  and  permits  the  ray  to  digest  the 


196  SUN  HUNTING 

clams.  This  doesn't  sound  exactly  right, 
but  one  should  be  careful  about  disbelieving 
any  of  these  Florida  stories.  A  little  later 
a  giant  marlin  or  spear  fish  plunged  out  of 
the  water  among  our  three  lines  when  each 
line  had  a  dolphin  fighting  busily  at  its  end. 
Cap'n  Thompson  estimated  his  weight  at 
four  hundred  pounds,  but  three  hours  later 
he  was  estimating  it  at  seven  hundred 
pounds.  At  the  end  of  the  afternoon,  when 
the  lines  were  being  reeled  in  preparatory 
to  starting  home,  an  eight-foot  shark 
surged  up  from  nowhere  and  removed  my 
bait  from  beneath  my  hand.  Fortunately, 
he  removed  the  hook  with  it,  and  a  few 
minutes  later  he  was  lashed  fast  to  the  stern 
of  the  boat,  making  a  hurried  trip  back  to 
Miami — where  Director  Louis  Mowbray  of 
the  Aquarium  spent  a  happy  hour  removing 
pilot  fish  and  parasites  from  his  nose  and 
gills  and  tongue. 

One  can  never  tell  what  is  going  to  turn 
up  in  Florida  waters.    The  prospectuses  of 


TROPICAL  GROWTH          197 

both  winter  and  summer  resorts  usually  lay 
it  on  a  little  too  thick.  The  Miami  pros- 
pectuses always  sound  very  much  too  much. 
Starting  with  the  bathing-girls  on  the  front 
cover  and  ending  with  the  proud  fisherman 
on  the  back  cover,  they  always  look  a  little 
too  perfect.  The  phrasing,  too,  seems  a 
trifle  sappy  and  fat-headed.  'It's  June  in 
Miami,"  these  prospectuses  declare,  "where 
winter  is  turned  to  summer."  They  seem 
to  rave  over-wildly.  "Miami  welcomes  you 
with  the  smile  of  the  tropics,"  rave  these  bits 
of  passionate  literature,  "and  the  warmth  of 
the  unclouded  sun  is  instilled  in  the  hos- 
pitality of  the  greeting  that  awaits  you 
here.  Leave  winter  behind,  fling  care  to 
the  icy  winds,  come  to  Miami  and  play  at  be- 
ing eternally  young  again.  Here  in  Nature's 
most  alluring  out-of-doors  playground,  un- 
der azure  skies,  amid  fronded  palms  and 
riotous  flowers,  with  song  of  bird,  balmy  air, 
and  the  benediction  of  glorious  sunshine,  find 
health,  happiness  and  contentment," 


198  SUN  HUNTING 

It  seems  like  raving  before  you've  been 
there.  But  after  you've  been  there  you 
recognize  that  the  bathing  girls  and  the  fish 
are  as  advertised.  As  for  the  prospectuses, 
they  don't  seem  so  violent  after  all.  In  fact, 
they  seem  pretty  conservative. 

THE  END 


University  of  California 

SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 

Return  this  material  to  the  library 

from  which  it  was  borrowed. 


iww. 


"  •      If   II I  I    I  I    II    II    II 

A     000  570  590     o 


